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THE MEETING-PLACE 



GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



Sir J. William Dawson, LL.D., P.G.S. 



" The name of Sir William Dawson on a titlepage is a guarantee 
of two things: one, that the book is orthodox and thoroughly 
evangelical ; and the other, that the matter of it is first-class, accord- 
ing to the highest scientific standard.'^ 

—The Illustrated Christian AVkekly. 



The Meeting=Place of Geology and History. 

Illustrated. i2mo, doth $1.25 

Sir William Dawson's aim in this volume is aptly described 
by the title. It is to fix with that measure of definiteness which 
the best and latest research permits the period when human life 
beg'an on the earth, and to discuss from the gfeologic standpoint 
the many questions of interest connected with this event. He 
shows in how many different ways science confirms the teaching 
of Scripture in this department of knowledge. 

Modern Ideas of Evolution as related to Revela- 
tion and Science. Sixth Edition, Revised and 
Enlarged. 1 2mo, clcth 1 .50 

Carefully and thoroughly revised in the light of the criticism, 
favorable and adverse, which the preceding five editions have 
received. 

" Dr. Dawson is himself a man of eminent judicial temper, a 
widely read scholar, and a close, profound thinker, which makes 
the blow he deals the Evolution hypothesis all the heavier. We 
commend it to our readers as one of the most thorough and 
searching books on the subject yet published." — The Christian 
at Work. 

The Chain of Life in Geological Time. A Sketch 
of the Origin and Succession of Animals and Plants. 
Illustrated. Third and Revised Edition. i2mo, 

cloth 2.00 

"The judicial style of the writer in argument is enlivened 
by his ability to render science most attractive and popular. He 
holds to the orthodox view of the ordered plan of the universe, 
and yet considers without prejudice the alluring ideas prevalent 
in modern scientific circles."— 7"^^ Christiati Advocate (JV. Y.) 

Egypt and Syria. Their Physical Features in Relation to 
Bible History. Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged. 
With many Illustrations, '■'By-Paths of Bible Knowl- 
edge,''' Vol. VI. 1 2mo, cloth 1 .20 

" This is one of the most interesting of the series to which it 
belongs. It is the result of personal observation, and the work 
of a practised geological observer." — The British Quarterly 

Review. 



THE MEETING-PLACE _ 

OF 

Geology and History 



SIR J. WILLIAM DAWSON, LL.D., F.R.S. 

AUTHOR OF 

THE EAKTH AND MAN," "MODERN IDEAS OF EVOLUTION," " THE CHAIN 

OF LIFE IN GEOLOGICAL TIME," ETC. 

^'^ Of C8,V/?^^-v 






FLEMING H. REVBLL COMPANY 
New York Chicago Toronto 

The Religious Tract Society^ London 






Copyrifihl , 1894 
Fleming H. Revell Company 



PREFACE 



The object of this little book is to give a clear and 
accurate statement of facts bearing on the character 
of the debatable ground intervening between the 
later part of the geological record and the begin- 
nings of sacred and secular history. 

The subject is one as yet full of difficulty ; but 
the materials for its treatment have been rapidly 
accumulating, and it is hoped that it may prove 
possible to render it more interesting and intelligible 
than heretofore. 

J. W. D 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. General Nature of the Subject . . ii 

II. The World before Man i8 

III. The Earliest Traces of Man ... 27 

IV. The Palanthropic Age 40 

V. SUIDIV.SIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE PAL- 
ANTHROPIC Age 69 

VI. End of the Palanthropic Age . . . 85 

VII. The Early Neanthropic Age ... 94 

VIII. The Palanthropic Age in the Light of 

History 106 

IX. The Deluge of Noah 121 

X. Special Questions respecting the Deluge 151 

XI. The Prehistoric and Historic in the East 164 

XII. The Neanthropic Dispersion . . . . 183 

XIII. Summary of Results . . . . .210 

Index . , . . . . . , . 219 



\ 

\ 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



I'AOH 

Section at Trenton, on the Delaware, showing the 
Relation of the Stone Implements to the Glacial (?) 
Gravels (after Holmes) .32 

Chipped Quartzites, Modern American (after Ilolmes) . 33 

Flint Hache of the Ancient or Chellean Type, 

AURILLAC (after Carthaillac) 41 

Cave of Goyet, Belgium (Section after Dupont) , . 47 

Lance Head formed of a Flint Flake (Cave of Mou- 
stier). The Flat Face shows a Bulb of Percussion 
(after Falsan) ......... 49 

Outline of the Skull of the ' Old Man of Cro- 

MAGNON ' (after Christy and Lartet) 54 

The First Skeleton found in the Mentone Caves 

(after Riviere) ......... 57 

Handle of a Piercer, or Bodkin, in Bone, from Lau- 

gerie Basse, in Form of a Deer .... 59 

Flint Flake Knife, found in the Hand of the ' Giant' 

Skeleton of Mentone (after Evans) .... 59 

Neanderthal Skull — two Outlines : the Outer giving 

THE more Correct Form (from Science) ... 60 

Skull of Canstadt Type found at Spy, Belgium, hy 
Fraipont and Loiiest 61 



GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



PAGE 



Outline of Mammoth, Carved on a Plate of Ivory 

FROM the Cave of La Madeleine .... 68 

Tooth of Cave Bear, with Engraving of a Seal, 
from a Collar found at Sordes, Pyrenees (after 
Carthaillac) 71 

The Skeleton of Laugerie Basse, Dordogne, showing 
the Position of the Perforated Shells on the 
Limbs and Forehead (after Carthaillac) .... 79 

Skull from Truch^re, showing a peculiar Pai.an- 
thropic Type allied to Neanthropic Races (after 
Quatrefages) . °2 

Flint Flakes of two Types, from Palanthropic and 
Neanthropic Caves in the Lebanon . . . • 97 

Restoration of the Sepulchral Cave of Frontal, 

Belgium (after Dupont) . • 99 

Cromlech at Fontanaccia, Corsica (after De Mortillet) . 105 

Map showing the Geographical and Geological Re- 
lations OF the Site of Eden, as described in 
Genesis "7 

Map showing Lines of Postdiluvian Migrations from 
Shinar, as in Genesis x. .... 185 

Mead illustrating the most Ancient Type of Cushite 
Turanian, from Tel-loh (after de Sarzec). The cap is 
perhaps an iiBitation of the antediluvian shell-caps, like that 
of the ' Man of Mentone ' ^91 



THE MEETING^PLACE 

% 

OF 

GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



CHAPTER I 

GENERAL NATURE OF THE SUBJECT 

The science of the earth and the history of man, 
though cultivated by very different classes of 
specialists and in very different ways, must have 
their meeting-place. They must indeed not only 
meet, but overlap and run abreast of each other 
throughout nearly the whole time occupied by the 
existence of man on the earth. The geologist, from 
his point of view, studies all the stratified crust of 
the earth, down to the mud deposited by last year's 
river inundations. The historian, aided by the 
archaeologist, has written and monumental evidence 
carrying him back to the time of the earliest known 
men, many thousands of years ago. Throughout all 



12 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

this interval the two records must have run more or 
less parallel to each other, and must be in contact 
along the whole line. 

The geologist, ascending from the oldest and 
lowest portions of the earth's crust, and dealing for 
millions of years with physical forces and the in- 
stinctive powers of animals alone, at length as he 
approaches the surface*^finds himself in contact with 
an entirely new agency, the free-will and conscious 
action of man. It is true that at first the effects of 
these are small, and the time in which they have been 
active is insignificant in comparison with that occu- 
pied by previous geological ages ; but they introduce 
new questions which constantly grow in importance, 
down to those later times in which human agency 
has so profoundly affected the surface of the earth 
and its living inhabitants. Finally, the geologist is 
obliged to have recourse to human observation and 
testimony for his information respecting those modern 
causes to which he has to appeal for the explanation 
of former changes, and has to adduce effects produced 
by human agency in illustration of, or in contrast 
with, mutations in the pre-human periods. 

The historian, on the other hand, finds, as he 
passes backward into earlier ages, documentary 
evidence failing him, and much of what he can obtain 
becoming mythical, vague or uncertain, or difficult of 
explanation by modern analogies, until at length he 
is fain to have recourse to the pick-axe and spade, 
and to endeavour to disinter from the earth the 



GENERAL NATURE OF THE SUBJECT 13 

scanty relics of primeval man, much as the geologist 
searches in the bedded rocks for the fossils which 
they contain. He has even learned to use for these 
earliest ages the term prehistoric, and so practically 
to transfer them to the domain of the archaeologist 
and geologist. 

It is evident, therefore, that if we seek for the 
meeting-place of geology and history, we shall find 
not a mere point or line of contact, but a series of 
such points, and even a complicated splicing together 
of different threads of investigation, which it may be 
difficult to disentangle, and which the geological 
specialist alone, or the historical specialist alone, may 
be unable fully to understand. The object of this 
little volume will be to unravel as many as possible 
of these threads of contact, and to make their value 
and meaning plain to the general reader, so that he 
may not, on the one hand, blindly follow mere 
assertions and speculations, or, on the other, fail to 
appreciate ascertained and weighty facts relating to 
this great and important matter of human origins. 

This is the more necessary since, even in works 
of some pretension, there are tendencies on the one 
hand to overlook geological evidence in favour of 
written records, or even of conjectural hypotheses, 
and on the other to reject all early historical testi- 
mony or tradition as valueless. We shall find that 
neither of these extremes is conducive to accurate 
conclusions. Researches of a geologico-historical 
character necessarily also bring us in view of the 



14 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

early history of our sacred books. This may be to 
some extent an evil, as inviting the excitement of 
religious controversy ; but on the other hand the fact 
that the early history incorporated in the Bible goes 
back to the introduction of man, and connects this 
with the completion of the physical and organic 
preparations for his advent, has many and important 
uses. It would seem indeed that it is a great advan- 
tage to our Christian civilisation that our sacred books 
begin with a history of creation, giving an idea of 
order and progress in the creative work. Whether 
we regard the days of creation as literal days or days 
of vision of a seer, or whether we hold them to be 
days of God and His working, suitable to the Eternal 
One and His mighty plan, and bearing the same 
relation to Him that ordinary working days bear to 
us, we cannot escape the idea of an orderly work in 
time. This, while it delivers the Bible reader from 
the extravagant myths current among heathen 
peoples, ancient and modern, predisposes him to 
expect that something may be learned from nature 
as to its beginning and progress. In like manner 
the short statements in Genesis respecting the early 
history of man have awakened curiosity as to human 
origins, and have led us to search for further details 
derivable from ancient monuments. The ordinary 
Christian who believes his Bible is thus so far on his 
way toward a rational geology and archaeology, and 
cannot say with truth that he is absolutely ignorant 
of the pre-human history of the earth. His notions, 



GENERAL NATURE OF THE SUBJECT 15 

it is true, may be imperfect, either by reason of the 
brevity of the record to which he trusts, or of his own 
imperfect knowledge of its contents, but they give to 
historical and archaeological inquiry an interest and 
importance which they could not otherwise possess.^ 

The earth has indeed, especially in our own time, 
and under the impulse of Christian civilisation, made 
wonderful revelations' as to its early history, to which 
we do well to take heed, as antidotes to some of the 
speculations which are palmed upon a credulous world 
as established truths. We have now very complete 
data for tracing the earth from its original formless 
or chaotic state through a number of formative 
and preparatory stages up to its modern condition ; 
but perhaps the parts of its history least clearly 
known, especially to general readers, are those that 
relate to the beginning and the end of the creative 
work. The earlier stages are those most different 
from our experience and whose monuments are most 
obscure. - The later stages on the other hand have 
left fewer monuments, and these have been compli- 
cated with modern changes under human influence. 
Besides this, it is always difficult to piece together the 
deductions from merely monumental evidence and 

' It is an interesting fact that the pecuniary means, the skill and 
labour expended in research in the more ancient historic regions, have 
to so large an extent been those of Christians interested in the Bible 
history. Yet some litteratcm's, who have contributed nothing to these 
results, attempt to distort and falsify them in the intere^^t of an un- 
historical and unscientific criticism, and even to taunt the Bible as 
adverse to archaeological inquiry. 



i6 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

the statements of written or traditional history. There 
would seem, however, to be now in our possession 
sufficient facts to link the human period to those 
which preceded it, and thereby to sweep away a large 
amount of misconception and misrepresentation in 
one department at least of the relations of natural 
science with history. 

I have called the subject with which we are to 
deal the meeting-place of two sciences. In reality, 
however, it might be embraced under the name 
anthropology, the science of man, which covers both 
his old prehistoric ages as revealed by geology and 
archaeology, and the more modern world which is 
still present, or of which we have written records. 
The main point to be observed is that it is necessary 
to place distinctly before our minds the fact that 
we are studying a period in which, on the one hand, 
we have to observe the precautions necessary in 
geological investigation, and on the other to examine 
the evidence of history and tradition. A failure either 
on the one side or the other may lead to the gravest 
errors. 

In studying the subjects thus indicated it will be 
necessary first to notice shortly the history of the 
earth before the human period, and its condition 
at the time of man's introduction. We may then 
'inquire as to the earliest known remains of man 
preserved in the crust of the earth, and trace his 
progress through the earlier part of the anthropic or 
human period, in so far as it is revealed to us by the 



GENERAL NATURE OF THE SUBJECT 17 

relics of man and his works preserved in the earth. 
We shall then be in a position to inquire as to the 
form in which the same chain of events is presented 
to us by history and tradition, and to discover the 
leading points in which the two records agree or 
appear to differ. "* 

It may be necessary here to define a few terms. 
The two latest of the great geological periods may be 
termed respectively the pleistoce.ne and the modern, 
or anthropic, the latter being the human period or 
age of man. The pleistocene includes what has been 
called the glacial age, a period of exceptional cold 
and of much subsidence and elevation of the land, in 
the northern hemisphere at least. The modern, or 
anthropic, is for our present purpose divisible into 
two sections— the early modern, or palanthropic, 
sometimes called quaternary, or post-glacial, and 
which may coincide with the antediluvian period of 
human history ; and the neanthropic^ extending on- 
ward to the present time.^ 

* The terms ' Palaeolithic ' and ' Neolithic ' have been used for the 
men of the Palanthropic and Neanthropic ages ; but these are objec- 
tionable, as implying that these ages can be best distinguished by the 
use of certain stone implements, v\hich is not the fact. I have pre- 
ferred, therefore, to call the earlier races of men palceocosmic^ and the 
later neocosmic, where it may be necessary to refer to them as races • 
while the periods to which they belong are respectively the Palanthropic 
and JSleanthropic, By the use of these terms all ambiguity will be 
avoided. 



B 



GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



CHAPTER II 

THE WORLD BEFORE MAN 

Man is of recent introduction on the earth. For 
miUions of years the slow process of world-making 
had been going on, with reference to physical struc- 
ture and to the lower grades of living creatures. 
Only within a few thousand years does our globe 
seem to have been fitted for its highest tenant. The 
evidence of this is to be found in any text-book of 
geology. I -propose here merely to present the his- 
tory of the earth in a series of word-pictures, introduc- 
tory to our special subject. 

Our first picture may be that of a nebula, vast 
and vaporous, containing the mixed and unconsoli- 
dated materials of the sun and planets — a void and 
desolate mass, slowly aggregating itself under the 
influence of gravitation. 

Our next may be that of an incandescent globe, 
molten and glowing, and surrounded by a vast vapor- 
ous envelope, but tending by degrees to a condition 
in which it shall have a solid crust, on which the 
greater part of the watery vapour suspended in its 
atmosphere is to be condensed into a heated ocean. 



THE WORLD BEFORE MAN 19 

Our third picture may represent the world of 
what geologists call the archaeaii, or eozoic period, 
when the crust had been furrowed up into ridges of 
land, and corresponding but wider depressions occu- 
pied by the sea. Into the latter the rains falling on 
the land are carrying sediment derived from the 
wasting rocks, though the waters are still warm and 
the thinner parts of the crust are still welling out 
rocky material, either molten or dissolved in heated 
water. In this period there were probably low forms 
of animal life in the waters and plants on the land, 
though we know little of their exact nature. 

A fourth picture may represent that great and 
long-continued palaeozoic period in which the waters 
swarmed with many forms of life, when fishes were 
introduced into the sea, and when the land became 
covered with dense forests of plants allied to the 
modern club-mosses, ferns, mares'-tails and pines ; 
while insects, scorpions and snails, and some of the 
humbler forms of reptiles, found place on the land. 

Returning after an interval, we should see a fifth 
picture, that of the mesozoic world. This was the 
age of reptiles, when animals of that class attained 
their highest and most gigantic forms, and occupied 
in the sea, on the land, and in the air the places now 
held by the mammals and the birds ; while the con- 
tinents were covered with a flora distinct alike from 
that of the previous and succeeding periods, replaced, 
however, as time went on by forests very like those 
of the modern world. In this age the earliest mam- 

B 2 



20 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

mals or ordinary quadrupeds were introduced, few at 
first, small and of lovv rank in their class. Birds also 
made their appearance, and toward the close of the 
period fishes of modern types swarmed for the first 
time in the sea. 

Lastly, we might see in the cenozoic, or tertiary 
age, the newest of all, quadrupeds dominant on the 
land and modern types of animal life in the sea. In 
this period our continents finally assumed their present 
forms. Toward its close and after many vicissitudes 
of geography and climate, and several successive 
dynasties of mammalian life, man and the land 
animals now his contemporaries occupied the world, 
and thus the cenozoic passes into the anthropic, or 
modern period, called by some, but without good 
reason, ' quaternary,' since it is in all respects a 
proper continuation of the tertiary, or cenozoic.^ 

This last age of the world is so intimately con- 
nected with man that it will be necessary to consider 
it more in detail. More particularly we may en- 
deavour to answer, if we can, the questions of order 
and time involved in man's late appearance. 

No geologist would expect to find any remains ot 
man or his works in the periods represented by our 
five earlier pictures, because in these periods the 
physical conditions necessary to man and the animals 
nearest to him in structure do not appear to have 

' It will be seen that our six pictures are in some degree parallel 
with the ' days ' of creation. This is not an intentional reconciliation. 
It merely expresses the fact of the case, whatever its significance. 



THE WORLD BEFORE MAN 21 

existed, and their places in nature were occupied by 
lower types. 

Nor for similar reasons would we expect to meet 
with man in the earlier part of that last, or ceno- 
zoic, period in which we still live ; and in point 
of fact it is only in superficial deposits of the later 
part of this last great period of the earth's history 
that we actually meet with evidence of the existence 
of the human species. 

If there is based on this fact a question as to the 
actual date of man's first appearance, the physical 
considerations indicate about twenty millions of years 
for the whole duration of the earth. Setting apart, say, 
a fourth of this time for the early pre-geologic con- 
dition of the world, the remainder may be roughly 
estimated as five millions for the archsean, or eozoic, 
six for the palaeozoic, three for the mesozoic, and one 
for the cenozoic.^ Of the last, the later part, in 
which there is a possibility of the existence of man, 
will be limited to less than a quarter of a million ; 
and within this the certainly known remains of man, 
whether attributed as by some to the latest inter- 
glacial period, or to the post-glacial — a mere question 
of terms, and not of facts — cannot be older, according 
to the best geological estimates, than from seven 
thousand to ten thousand years. This, according to 
our present knowledge, is the maximum date of the 

' The absolute length of these periods is, of course, a matter of 
estimation ; but the relative lengths of the different ages may be re- 
garded as a fair approximation, based on facts. 



22 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

oldest traces of man, and probably these are nearer 
in age to the smaller than to the larger number. 

If the reader will take the trouble to draw on 
paper a scale of twenty inches, each of these will 
represent a million of years of the earth's history, and 
the known duration of the human period may be 
indicated by a thickish line at one end of the scale. 
We may thus represent to the eye the recency of 
man's appearance, so far as at present known to 
science. 

It may be said that all this is mere assertion. It 
fairly represents, however, the conclusions reached on 
the latest geological evidence, though this evidence 
would demand for its full detail a larger space than 
the whole of this little volume. References are given 
below to works in which this evidence will be found. ^ 

It may also be objected that if, as held by some 
evolutionists, man was slowly developed from lower 
animals, and if his earliest known remains are still 
human in their characters, he must have had a vastly 
longer history covering the periods of his gradual 
change from, say, ape-like forms. This is admitted ; 
but then we have as yet no good evidence that man 
was so developed, and no remains of intermediate 
forms are yet known to science. Even should some 
animal, either recent or fossil, be discovered inter- 
mediate in structure between man and the highest 
apes, we should still require proof that it was the 

' Lyell's Sttuienls' Manual ; Dana's Manual ; Prestwich's Geology ; 
The Siory of the Earlh, by the author. 



THE WORLD BEFORE MAN 23 

ancestor of man, by the occurrence of connecting 
forms, or otherwise. As the facts now stand, the 
earh'est known remains of man are still Jiuman, and 
tell us nothing as to previous stages of development. 
We must now glance a little more particularly at 
w^hat may be termed the more immediate antece- 
dents of man. The latest great period of the earth's 
geological history (the cenozoic) was ingeniously 
subdivided by Lyell, on the ground of the percentages 
of extinct and surviving species of marine shells con- 
tained in its several beds. According to this method, 
which, with some modifications in detail, is still 
accepted, the eocene age, or that of the dawn of the 
recent, includes those formations in which the per- 
centage of modern or still living species of marine 
animals does not exceed three and a half, all the other 
species found being extinct. The miocene (less re- 
cent) includes beds in which the percentage of living 
species does not exceed thirty-five. The pliocene 
(more recent) includes beds in which the living forms 
of marine life exceed thirty-five per cent, but there 
is still a considerable proportion of extinct species. 
Newer than this we have the pleistocene (most recent), 
in which there are scarcely as many extinct species 
as there are of recent in the eocene. Lastly, the 
modern, of course, includes only the living species of 
the modern seas. Other geologists, notably Dawkins 
and Gandry, have arrived at similar results from a 
consideration of the vertebrate animals of the land. 
In the eocene we find numerous remains of mammals, 



24 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

or ordinary land quadrupeds, but all are extinct, and 
nearly all belong to extinct genera. In the miocene 
there are many living genera, but no species that 
survive to the present time. The pliocene begins to 
show a few living species, and these are dominant in 
the succeeding pleistocene. 

These several stages of the cenozoic were also 
characterised by great vicissitudes of geography and 
climate. In the early and middle portions of the 
eocene, much of the land of the northern hemisphere 
was under the sea or in the state of swamps and 
marshes, and there seems to have been a very mild 
and equable climate, insomuch that plants now 
limited to warm temperate regions could flourish in 
Greenland. It is further to be observed that regions 
such as Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt, which are 
known to us historically as among the earliest abodes 
of man, were at this time under the ocean, as were 
also rocks that now appear at great elevations in the 
highest mountains of Europe and Asia. For example, 
the limestones through which the Nile has cut its 
valley are marine beds of eocene age, and beds of 
the same period holding marine remains occur at an 
elevation of 16,000 feet in the Himalayan region. 

In the miocene the amount of land was somewhat 
greater, though large areas of the continents were 
still under the sea, and the climate was still mild, but 
for reasons to be stated in the sequel it is not likely 
that man inhabited the warm continents of this age. 
The pliocene inaugurates what has been termed a 



THE WORLD BEFORE MAN 25 

continental period, when the land of the northern 
hemisphere was higher and more extensive than at 
present. It was also a time of great physical change, 
when much erosion of valleys and sculpturing of the 
surface of the land occurred, and when extensive earth 
movements and ejections of igneous rock increased 
the irregularity of the surface and gave greater variety 
and beauty to the land. The pliocene was altogether 
a most important period for giving the finishing 
touches of physical geography, and in it several 
modern species of land animals were introduced ; but 
we have as yet, as we shall find in the sequel, no 
certain evidence that man was a witness of the move- 
ments and sculpturing of the earth's crust, so im- 
portant in the preparation of his future home, though 
statements to this effect have been made on grounds 
which we shall have to consider. 

In the course of the pliocene the previously high 
temperature of the northern hemisphere was sensibly 
lowered, and at its close the pleistocene period intro- 
duced a cold and wintry climate, along with gradual 
and unequal subsidence of the land, the whole pro- 
ducing that most dismal of the geological ages, known 
as the ' glacial period.' At this time much of the 
lower land of the continents was submerged and the 
mountains became covered with snow and ice, leaving 
space for vegetable and animal life only toward the 
south and in a few favoured spots in the higher 
■latitudes. There is much difference of opinion 
among geologists as to the extent, duration and 



26 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

vicissitudes of this reign of ice, but there can be no 
doubt that it destroyed much of the animal and 
vegetable life of the pliocene, or obliged it to migrate 
to the southward. In this period great deposits of 
mud, sand and gravel were laid down, which prepared 
the world for a new departure in the succeeding age. 
This we may name the post-glacial, or early modern 
period, and in it we have the most certain evidence 
of the existence of man, though the geographical 
arrangement of our continents and their animal in- 
habitants were in many respects different from what 
they now are. If geologists are right in the conclu- 
sion already stated, that the close of the glacial 
period is as recent as 7,000 years ago, this will give 
us a narrow limit in time for the are of man, at 
least under his present conditions. 

While, however, there is an absolute consensus 
of opinion among geologists as to the existence of 
man at or about the close of the glacial age, in 
the northern temperate regions at least, there are 
some facts which have been supposed to indicate a 
pre-glacial human period, or the advent of man even 
as early as the middle of the cenozoic time. These 
merit a short consideration. 



CHAPTER III 

THE EARLIEST TRACES OF INIAN 

In the eocene, or earliest cenozoic, it is not pre- 
tended by anyone that man existed, except inferen- 
tially, on the ground that if the remains we know in 
the earliest caves and gravels belong to men who 
were developed from apes on the method of natural 
selection, their ancestors must have existed, at least 
in a semi-human form, in the eocene. But no such 
precursors of man are yet known to us. It would 
have been pleasant to believe that man arrived in 
time to see the beautiful forests and to enjoy the mild 
climate of the golden age of the miocene, and this 
would have agreed with some human traditions ; but 
the probabilities are against it, as we know no one 
species of higher animal of the many found in the 
miocene that has survived to our time. The privilege 
of enjoying the forests of the miocene age seems to 
have been reserved for some large and specialised 
monkeys, which even Darwinians can scarcely claim 
as probable ancestors of man.^ It would appear also 
that owing to increasing refrigeration of climate these 

* Dryopithecus and Mesopithecus. 



28 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

apes were either obliged to leave Europe for warmer 
latitudes or became extinct in the succeeding pliocene. 

There are, however, in France two localities, one in 
the upper and the other in the middle miocene, which 
have afforded what are supposed to be worked flints.^ 
The geological age of the deposits seems in both cases 
beyond question, but doubts have been cast, and this 
seemingly with some reason, on the artificial character 
of the flint flakes, while in the case of some examples 
which appear to be scrapers and borers, like those in 
use long afterward by semi-civilised peoples for work- 
ing in bone and skin, there are grave doubts whether 
they actually came from the miocene beds. Lastly, 
it has even been suggested that these flints may be 
the handiwork of miocene apes, a suggestion not so 
unreasonable as at first sight it appears, when taken 
in connection with the working instincts of beavers 
and other animals. Monkeys, however, seem to have 
less of this gift as artificers than most other creatures. 
On the whole, we must regard the existence of miocene 
man as not proven, though, if it should prove to be a 
fact, it may be useful to some of the scoffers of these 
days to know that it would not be so irreconcilable 
with the Biblical account of creation as they seem to 
suppose. It might, however, prove a serious stum- 
bling-block to orthodox Darwinians, and might raise 
some difficulties respecting antediluvian genealogies. 

In the pliocene of Europe there are alleged to be 
instances of the occurrence of human bones. One of 

' Puy, Courny and Thenay. 



THE EARLIEST TRACES OE MAN 29 

these is that of the skull now in the museum of 
Florence, supposed to have been found in the pliocene 
of the Val d'Arno. It is, however, a skull of modern 
type, and may have been brought down from the 
surface by a landslip. But this explanation does not 
seem to apply to the human remains found in lower 
pliocene beds at Castelnedolo, near Brescia. They 
include a nearly entire human skeleton, and are said 
by good observers to have been imbedded in undis- 
turbed pliocene beds. M. Quatrefages, who has 
described them, and whose testimony should be con- 
sidered as that of an expert, was satisfied that the 
remains had not been interred, but were part of the 
original deposit. Unfortunately the skull of the only 
perfect skeleton is said to have been of fair propor- 
tions and superior to those of the ruder types of post- 
glacial men. This has cast a shade of suspicion on 
the discovery, especially on the part of evolutionists, 
who think it is not in accordance with theory that 
man should retrograde between the pliocene and the 
early modern period, instead of advancing. Still we 
may ask, why not } If men existed in the fine 
climates of the miocene and early pliocene, why 
should they not have been a noble race, suited to their 
environment ; and when the cold of the glacial period 
intervened, with its scarcity and hardships, might they 
not have deteriorated, to be subsequently improved 
when better conditions supervened? This would cer- 
tainly not be contradictory to experience in the case 
of varieties of other animals, however at variance 



so GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

with a hypothetical idea of necessarily progressive 
improvement. Let us hope that the existence of 
European pliocene man will be established, and that 
he will be found to have been not of low and bestial 
type, but, as the discoveries above referred to if 
genuine would indicate, a worthy progenitor of modern 
races of men. 

It still remains to inquire whether man may have 
made his appearance at the close of the pliocene or 
in the early stages of the pleistocene, before the full 
development of the glacial conditions of that period. 
Perhaps the most important indications of this kind 
are those adduced by Dr. Mourlon, of the Geological 
Survey of Belgium,' from which it would appear that 
worked flints and broken bones of animals occur in 
deposits, the relations of which would indicate that 
they belong either to the base of the pleistocene or 
close of the pliocene. They are imbedded in sands 
derived from eocene and pliocene beds, and supposed 
to have been remaniehy wind action. With the mo- 
desty of a true man of science, Mourlon presents his 
facts, and does not insist too strongly on the important 
conclusion to which they seem to tend, but he has 
certainly established the strongest case yet on record 
for the existence of tertiary man. With this should, 
however, be placed the facts adduced in a similar sense 
by Prestwich in his paper on the worked flints of 
Ightham.^ 

' Bulldin de VAcadhnie Royale de Belgique, 1889. 

'^ Journal of the Geolo^qical Society ^ London, May 1889. 



THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN 31 

Should this be estabhshed, the curious result will 
follow that man must have been the witness of two 
great continental subsidences, or deluges, that of the 
early pleistocene and the early modern, the former 
of which, and perhaps the latter also, must have been 
accompanied with a great access of cold in the 
northern hemisphere. It seems, however, more likely 
that the facts will be found to admit of a different 
explanation. 

Every reader of the scientific journals of the 
United States must be aware of the numerous finds 
of ' palaeolithic ' implements in ' glacial ' gravels, 
indicating a far greater antiquity of man in Arrte- 
rica than on other grounds we have a right to 
imagine. I have endeavoured to show, in a work 
published several years ago,^ how much doubt on 
geological grounds attaches to the reports of these 
discoveries, and how uncertain is the reference of the 
supposed implements to undisturbed glacial deposits, 
and how much such of the * palaeoliths ' as appear to 
be the work of man resemble the rougher tools and 
rejectamenta of the modern Indians. But since the 
publication of that work, so great a number of ' finds ' 
have been recorded, that despite their individual im- 
probability, one was almost overwhelmed by the coin- 
cidence of so many witnesses. Now the bubble seems 
to have been effectually pricked by Mr. W. H. Holmes^ 
of the American Geological Survey, who has published 

' Fossil Man. London, 1880. 



32 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

his observations in tiie American Journal of Anthropo- 
logy and elsewhere.^ 

One of the most widely- known examples was that 
of Trenton, on the Delaware, where there was a bed 
of gravel alleged to be pleistocene, and which seemed 
to contain enough of ' palaeolithic ' implements to 




^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 



SECTION AT TRENTON, ON THE DELAWARE, SHOWING THE RELA- 
TION OF THE STONE IMPLEMENTS TO THE GLACIAL (?) GRAVELS 

(after Holmes) 

stock all the museums in the w^orld. The evidence 
of age was not satisfactory from a geological point 
of view, and Holmes, with the aid of a deep exca- 
vation made for a city sewer, has shown that the 
supposed implements do not belong to the undis- 
turbed gravel, but merely to a talus of loose debris 

' Science, November \Z^2. ', Jou7'iial of Geology^ i893- 



34 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

lying against it, and to which modern Indians 
resorted to find material for implements, and left 
behind them rejected or unfinished pieces. This 
alleged discovery has therefore no geological or 
anthropological significance. The same acute and 
industrious observer has inquired into a number of 
similar cases in different parts of the United States, 
and finds all liable to objections on similar grounds, 
except in a few cases in which the alleged implements 
are probably not artificial. These observations not 
only dispose, for the present at least, of palaeolithic 
man in America, but they suggest the propriety of a 
revision of the whole doctrine of ' palaeolithic ' and 
' neolithic ' implements as held in Great Britain and 
elsewhere. Such distinctions are often founded on 
forms which may quite as well represent merely local 
or temporary exigencies, or the debris of old work- 
shops, as any difference of time or culture. 

For the present, therefore, we may afford to pass 
over with this slight notice the alleged occurrence of 
miocene and pliocene man, and this the rather since, 
if such men ever existed in the northern hemisphere, 
the cold and submergence of the pleistocene must 
have cut them off from their more modern successors 
in such a way that man must practically have made 
a new beginning at the close of the glacial age. 

I do not refer here to the finds of skulls and 
implements in the auriferous gravels of Western 
America. Some of these, if genuine, might go back 
to the pliocene age, but in so far as the evidence now 



THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN 35 

available indicates, they all belong to the modern 
races of Indians, and, in one way or another, by 
fraud or error, have had assigned to them a fabulous 
antiquity. 

There still seems reason to believe that remains 
of man and his works exist in beds which are over- 
laid by boulders and gravel, implying a cold climate. 
These may indicate the last portion of the glacial 
period proper, in which case the beds with human 
remains may be called inter-glacial, or they may 
indicate a partial relapse to the cold conditions occur- 
ring after the glacial age had passed away, and in 
the early part of the modern period. My own view 
is, that it is most natural to draw the boundary line of 
the pleistocene and anthropic or modern at the point 
where the earliest certain evidences of man appear, 
and that the anthropic age will be found to include 
not only an early period of mild climate succeeding 
the glacial age, but a little later a return of cold, not 
comparable with that of the extreme glacial period, 
but sufficient seriously to affect human interests, and 
which almost immediately preceded those physical 
changes which carried away palseocosmic man, or the 
man of the earliest period, and many of his com- 
panion animals, and introduced the neanthropic or 
later human age. We shall find facts bearing on this 
in the sequel. 

In the meantime, we may consider it as established 
beyond cavil that man was already in Europe im- 
mediately after the close of the glacial period, and 



36 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

was contemporary with the species of animals, many 
of them large and formidable, which at that time 
occupied the land. He must have entered on the 
possession of a world more ample and richer in re- 
sources than that which remains to us. The early 
post-glacial age was, like the preceding pliocene, a 
time of continental elevation, in which the dry land 
spread itself widely over the now submerged margins 
of the sea basins. In Europe, the British Islands were 
connected with the mainland, and Ireland was united 
to England. The Rhine flowed northward to the 
Orkneys, through a wide plain probably wooded and 
swarming with great quadrupeds, now extinct or 
strange to Europe. The Thames and the Humber 
were tributaries of the Rhine. The land of France 
and Spain extended out to the hundred-fathom line. 
The shallower parts of the Mediterranean were dry 
land, and that sea was divided into two parts by land 
connecting Italy with Africa. Possibly portions of 
the shallower areas of the Atlantic were so elevated 
as to connect Europe and America more closely than 
at present. 

Connected with this elevation of the continents 
out of the sea was a great change of climate, whereby 
the cold of the pleistocene age passed away and a 
milder climate overspread the northern hemisphere, 
while the newly-raised land and that vacated by snow 
and ice became clothed with vegetation, and were 
occupied by a rich quadrupedal fauna, including even 
in the northern parts of Europe, Asia, and America, 



THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN 37 

species of elephant, rhinoceros, and other genera 
now confined to the warmer cHmates. This new and 
noble world was the rich heritage of primeval man. 

Pictet has estimated the number of species of 
mammals inhabiting Europe in the palanthropic 
period at ninety-eight,^ of .which only fifty-seven now 
live there, the remainder being either wholly or locally 
extinct — that is, they are either not now existing in 
any part of the world, or are found only beyond the 
limits of Cefitral, Western, and Southern Europe. 
The extinct species also include the largest and 
noblest of all. It has been remarked that the 
assemblage of palanthropic species in Europe and 
Western Asia is so great and varied that with our 
present experience we can scarcely imagine them 
to have existed contemporaneously in the same 
region. For example, the association of species of 
elephant and rhinoceros, the musk-sheep, the reindeer, 
the Cape hyena, and the hippopotamus seems to be 
incongruous. 

Various theories have been proposed to remove 
the difficulty. Modern analogies will allow us to 
believe in such astounding facts if we take into 
account the probability of a warm climate, especially 
in summer, along with a wooded state of the country 
providing much shelter, and wide continental plains 
affording facilities for seasonal migrations. There 

• Zittel, in a recent paper (1893), gives no species of mammals in 
the pleistocene and early modern. Of these about twenty of the 
largest and most important are extinct. 



38 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

were no doubt also, climatal changes in the course of 
the age, which may have tended to the remarkable 
mixture of animal types in its deposits. In connec- 
tion with this there is now every reason to believe that 
while, in its earlier part, the palanthropic age was 
distinguished by a warm climate, in its later portion 
a colder and more inclement atmosphere crept over 
the northern hemisphere. As an illustration of this, 
it is known that in the earlier part of the period a 
noble species of elephant named Elephas antiqims, 
and a rhinoceros {^R. Merkii), abounded in Europe ; 
but as the age advanced these species disappeared, 
and were replaced by the mammoth {E. priinigenius) 
and the woolly rhinoceros {R. ticJiorhinus^)^ animals 
clothed like the musk-ox in dense wool and hair, and 
evidently intended for a rigorous climate. With and 
succeeding these last species, the reindeer becomes 
characteristic and abundant. It is, as we shall see, a 
point of much importance in what may be called the 
prehistoric history of man, that he was introduced in 
a period of genial temperature as well as of wide 
continental extension, and survived to find his physi- 
cal environment gradually becoming less favourable, 
and the age ending in that great cataclysm which 
swept so many species of animals and tribes of 
men out of existence, and reduced the dry land of 
our continents to its present comparatively limited 
area. 

I should, perhaps, have noticed here the worked 
flints found so abundantly in some parts of the south 



THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN 39 

of England, which have long attracted the attention of 
collectors, and have in some cases been referred to 
glacial or pre-glacial times. I believe, however, they 
are all really post-glacial, though in some cases be- 
longing to the earliest portion of that period.^ 

We may close the present chapter by presenting 
to the eye in a tabular form the series of events 
included in the pleistocene and modern periods of 
the great cenozoic time. 

LATER CENOZOIC, OR TERTIARY PERIOD 

{In Asce7idi7tg Order ^ or from the Older to tJie Newer) 
Newer Pliocene. — A continental period of long duration, 
elevated land, much erosion, much volcanic action. 

Pleistocene. — Irregular elevation and depression of the 
land, ending in wide submergence with cold climate. Glaciers 
on all mountains near to coasts and ice-drift over submerged 
plains. Glacial period, with an inter-glacial mild period in the 
middle and great submergence of the continents toward the 
close. 

Anthropic. — Palanthropk, or post-glacial, in which the 
land emerges and attains a very wide extension, and is inhabited 
by a varied mammalian fauna. Man appears in Europe, Asia, 
and North Africa. Terminated by a recurrence of cold and 
great subsidence, deluging all the lower lands. Neanthropic. — 
Area of continents smaller than in the previous period. Sur- 
viving races of men and species of animals repeople the 
world. Modern races of men and modern animals. 



' Prestwich on * Ightham ^eds,^ Joum. Geo!. Soc.^ 1893; T>?c^- 
Vvas,^ Journ. Anthrop. Soc, 1894. 



40 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



CHAPTER IV 

THE PALANTHROPIC AGE* 

We have now to inquire more particularly what we 
can learn as to the earliest men known to us, those 
who appeared in Western Asia and Europe at the 
close of the glacial period, when the cold had passed 
away and a genial climate had succeeded, and when 
the continents of the northern hemisphere had attained 
to their largest dimensions, were clothed with a rich 
vegetation and tenanted by an abundant mammalian 
fauna, including many large and important creatures 
now extinct. 

We may first notice here a necessary limitation to 
our knowledge. The dry land of this age was of 
greater dimensions than at present. A large portion 
of what then was land is consequently now under the 
sea or deeply buried in alluvial deposits. Hence if 
any men of this age lived near the borders of the 
ocean, their remains must now be inaccessible, and 
the relics which we find must be those of inland tribes 

' Called by some ' Palaeolithic,' from the use of implements like 
hat figured on p. 41. 



THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 



41 



or of those who were driven inland by the encroach- 
ments of the waters. Our means of information are 
thus Hmited, and we must be prepared to admit that 
there may have been in this age great and populous 
communities of which we can have no record, at least 




i 



FLINT HACHE OF THE ANCIENT OR CHELLEAN TYPE, AURILLAC 

(after Carthaillac) 



of a geological character. Hence if we should find 
remains of only rude races of men, we should not be 
justified in assuming that all the peoples of the 
palanthropic age were of this character, more espe- 
cially if we can find any indications that the men 



42 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

whose remains are accessible to us, though rude 
themselves, may have belonged to more advanced 
races. 

The bones, implements and weapons, and debris 
of the feasts of these primitive peoples are to be found 
principally in caves of residence or of sepulture,' and 
in the alluvia deposited by rivers, and in a few cases 
in rock fissures or marine gravels, into which remains 
were drifted, or in which they wqre deposited by 
water. Here again, we have another limitation, for it 
is possible that large populations may have lived on 
plains or in forests in perishable structures, and, like 
some modern savages, may have disposed of their 
dead in such a way that their bones could not have 
been preserved. In such cases we can hope to obtain, 
and then very rarely, only stone implements and other 
imperishable relics. 

Notwithstanding these limitations, however, it is 
wonderful that so much has been recovered from the 
ground by the diligence of collectors, and that the 
material thus obtained has proved so fertile in in- 
formation respecting our long-perished ancestors. 

' Caverns, in relation to this subject, may be divided into those of 
residence, in which early men have lived and have left therein the 
debris of their food, the ashes and cinders of their fires, and imple- 
ments, &c. ; those of sepulture, in which the bodies of the dead have 
been deposited ; and those of inundation, into which the bodies of 
animals or men have been drifted by floods. The same cave may, 
however, exhibit these different conditions in the deposits on its succes- 
sive floors. Thus men may have inhabited a cave for a time ; it may 
next have been invaded by river floods depositing mud, and it may 
subsequently have been used for burial. 



THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 43 

Supposing, then, that we search for remains of 
paI?eocosmic men in river alluvia, or in caves of 
residence or burial, or in similar repositories, the 
question next arises, by what means can we distinguish 
their bones from those of later times? The following 
criteria are available : 

(i) The remains were in their present condition 
at least as long ago as the date of the earliest history 
or tradition. This evidence is of course of greatest 
value in those regions in which history extends 
farthest back. Thus the remains of early men in the 
Lebanon caves, which we know date much farther 
back than the arrival of the first Phoenicians and 
Canaanites in Syria, are in a different position, in so 
far as history is concerned, from those occurring in 
countries whose written history goes back only a few 
centuries. 

(2) The deposits containing these remains may 
underlie those holding relics of historic times, or may 
indicate ditlerent physical conditions of the districts 
in which they occur from those known within historic 
periods. This is the case with some river beds, as 
those of Grenelle, near Paris, and with the successive 
deposits in old caves of residence. 

(3) They may be accompanied by remains of 
animals now extinct in the regions in question, and 
whose disappearance and replacement by the modern 
fauna implies great lapse of time and physical changes ; 
as, for instance, when we find that men have left re- 
mains of their feasts holding bones of the extinct 



44 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

woolly rhinoceros and his contemporaries, or in now 
temperate climates, those of the reindeer. 

(4) The remains themselves may indicate a race 
or races of men and a condition of the arts of life 
different from any known in the region in historic 
times. Thus we may have skulls and skeletons 
indicating men racially distinct from any now extant, 
and implements and weapons different from those in 
use in the times of history or tradition. 

We have now to consider what evidence of this 
kind vindicates the assertion that man existed on our 
continents in the second continental or post-glacial 
age, or, as others will have it, in the closing period 01 
the glacial age, and was contemporary with the 
mammoth and other great beasts now extinct. This 
evidence, which has been accumulating with great 
rapidity and relates to man}- parts of the northern 
hemisphere, is too voluminous to be reproduced here.' 
But a few examples of it may be given, more especially 
from parts of the old world whose history extends 
farthest back and where explorations have been most 
extensive. 

My first instance shall be one originally described 
by Canon Tristram, and which I had an opportunity 
to examine in 1884 — the caverns or rock shelters in 
the face of the limestone cliff of the pass of Nahr-el- 

' Reference may be made to Christy and Lartet, Reliquice Aqtii- 
tanica ; Quatrefages, Homme Fossile ; Dupont, U Homme pendant 
les Ages de Pierre ; Carthaillac, La France Prehistorique ; Dawkins, 
Cave Hunting and Early Man in Britaijt ; Fossil Men and Modern 
Science in Bible Lands^ by the author. 



THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 45 

Kelb, north of Beyrout At this place, in old caverns 
partly cut away in the forming of the Roman road 
round the cliff, there is a hard stalagmite, or modern 
limestone, produced by the calcareous drippings from 
the rock. This is filled with broken bones inter- 
mixed with flint flakes suitable for use as knives or 
spears or darts, and occasional fragments of charcoal. 
The bones are those of large animals, and have been 
broken for the extraction of the marrow ; and the 
whole is evidently the remnants of the cuisine of 
some primitive tribe of hunters, now cemented into 
a somewhat hard stone by stalagmitic matter. The 
bones are not those of the present animals of Syria, 
but principally of an extinct species of rhinoceros 
{R. tichorhinus), a species of bison, and other large 
mammals which inhabited the region in the pleistocene 
and post-glacial periods. It is farther known that 
these animals had been extinct long before the early 
Phoenicians penetrated into this country, perhaps 
3000 B.C., and that the deposits existed in their 
present state when the early Egyptian conquerors 
passed this way, at least 1 500 B.C., on . their march 
to encounter the Hittites. It is also known that 
the earliest historic aborigines of the Lebanon, cer- 
tain rude tribes which seem to have existed there 
before the migration of the Phoenicians, subsisted on 
the modern animals of the district, and used flint 
implements and weapons somewhat differing from 
those of the earlier cave men of the region.^ What, 

' See the illustration on p. 97. 



46 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

then, were these earher cave men ? Certainly no 
people known to history, unless those whom we know 
as antediluvians.^ 

From the Lebanon we may pass to the west of 
Europe, where in France and Belgium a vast number 
of interesting relics of palaeocosmic man have been 
discovered, and have been scientifically examined. 

We may take as an illustration the cave of Goyet, 
on the cliffs bounding the ravine of the Samson, a 
tributary of the Meuse. This cavern is about forty- 
five feet above the present ordinary level of the river, 
but in post-glacial times seems to have been invaded 
by inundations, as it shows on its floor five distinct 
ossiferous surfaces, separated by layers of river-mud. 
These successive surfaces have been carefully ex- 
amined by M. Dupont, and their contents noted. 

On the lowest of these, or the first in order of age, 
were found numerous skeletons and detached bones 
of the cave lion and the cave bear ; the former a 
possible ancestor of the lion of Western Asia, the 
latter closely allied to the grizzly bear of North 
America, but both entirely extinct in Europe. One 
of the skeletons of the lion was of unusually large 
size, and so complete that when set up it forms the 
principal ornament of the cave collection in the 
Brussels Museum. 

The next surface, the second in order of time, had 

' For more detailed description see Modern Science in Bible Lands ; 
also Egypt and Syria, in the Bypaths of Bible Knowledge^ by the 
author. 



THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 



47 



a greater variety of animal remains. The lion had 
disappeared, and instead hyenas haunted the cave, 
and had dragged in animal bones to be gnawed. 
These included remains of the cave bear, wolf, 
rhinoceros, mammoth, wild horse, wapiti, Irish stag, 
chamois, reindeer, wild ox, besides several smaller 




CAVE OF GOYET, BELGIUM (section after Dupont) 
I to 5, layers of clay deposited in the mammoth ages 

animals. The above animals are now all unknown 
in the fauna of modern Europe, except the reindeer, 
the chamois, and the wolf. But the most remarkable 
discovery on this surface .was that of a few human 
bones, gnawed like the others by the hyenas. Man 
was thus already in the country, and contemporary 



48 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

with all these animals. How the hyena obtained his 
bones, whether from some neglected corpse or from 
some badly-constructed grave, will never be known ; 
but the discovery introduces us to a tribe or family 
of men coming as immigrants into a region already 
stocked with many great quadrupeds. They probably 
did not yet dwell in caves, which, at a later and 
perhaps more inclement period, formed their homes. 
Dupont concludes from the condition of the bones 
that on both the older surfaces the cave bear was 
the later tenant, and had replaced the lion on the first 
and the hyena on the second. 

The remaining surfaces introduce us to man as a 
cave-dweller. On the oldest of them are found not 
only abundance of dcbi'is of food, but worked flints 
and bones, objects of ornament, and evidences of the 
use of fire. The two higher layers show works of 
art in more varied and improved forms, as if a 
certain progress in the arts of life had taken place 
during the occupancy of the cave. Among the 
objects in the upper layers were red oxide of iron, 
showing the use of colouring matter for the skin or 
garments, bone needles, proving the manufacture of 
clothing by sewing, bone points for darts, skilfully- 
barbed bone harpoons, ornaments made of perforated 
teeth of animals, and fragments of bone, and a 
remarkable necklace of a hundred and twenty-four 
silicified shells of the genus Turritella, looking like 
spirals of agate, with a pendant made of another and 
larger shell. These shells are not known to occur 



THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 



49 



nearer to the cave than Rheims, in Champagne. It 
is scarcely too much to say that this necklace 
might be worn by any lady of the present day. A 
certain amount of imitative art is also shown in the 
carving of animal and plant forms and fancy devices 





LANCE-HEAD FORMED OF A FLINT FLAKE (GAVE OF MOUSTIER) 

Similar to weapons found in the Goyet cave. The flat face 
shows a bulb of percussion (after Falsan) 

on pieces of reindeer antler, which may have served 
for handles of weapons or implements. But objects 
of much more elaborate design have been found in 
caverns of this age in France. (See illustrations on 
pp. 59 and ^'^^j 

The food of these people, in so far as it was of an 

D 



50 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

animal nature, may be learned from the broken bones, 
which show that here as elsewhere they carried into 
their caves only the legs and skulls of the larger 
animals they killed, leaving the carcases ; though it is 
quite possible that, like North American hunting 
Indians, they may have stripped off portions of flesh 
from the back, and preserved the heart, liver, &c., which 
would of course leave no remains. 

Dupont gives lists of the animals in each layer. 
Those in the lower of the anthropic layers consist of 
twenty-three species of quadrupeds and some bones 
of birds. Among the former were the mammoth, the 
rhinoceros, two species of bear, the horse, the rein- 
deer, tw^o other species of deer and two bovine 
animals. Even the lion, the hyena and the wolf 
were eaten by these people. It is interesting to note 
that the numerical preponderance was in favour of 
the reindeer and the wild horse, though remains 
were ^ound indicating seven individuals of the mam- 
moth, and four of the rhinoceros, as having fallen 
a prey to the old hunters. In the highest bed the 
number of species and the proportions of each one 
are nearly the same, so that no material change in 
the fauna had occurred during the occupancy of this 
cave. It may also be noted that while Dupont calls 
this a cave of the mammoth age, the French arch- 
aeologists are in the habit of naming similar deposits 
those of the reindeer age. The age of both animals 
was in reality the same, except that in France the 
reindeer seems to have survived the mammoth, and 



THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 51 

indeed we know this to be the fact from its continuing 
in the forests of Germany till the Roman times. 

This cave may serve as an example of the manner 
in which the men of the palanthropic age make their 
appearance. Let it be observed also that this is only 
one instance selected from many giving similar tes- 
timony, and that Dupont adduces evidence to show 
that there may have been a contemporary plain- 
dwelling people, of whom less is known than of the 
troglodytes. Let it also be noted that there are other 
caves in Belgium, to which we shall return later, which 
show how the neocosmic men contemporary with the 
present fauna succeeded the men of the mammoth 
age. 

We may now inquire as to the physical characters 
of the men of this period. It may be stated in 
answer to this question that two races of men are 
known in the palanthropic age, both somewhat 
different from any existing peoples, and known re- 
spectively as the Canstadt and Cro-magnon races. 
As the latter is the most important and best known, 
we may take it first, though the former may locally 
at least have been the older. 

The valley of the little river Vezere, a tributary of 
the Dordogne, in the south of France, abounding in 
overhanging rock-shelters, seems to have been a 
favourite abode of the men of the mammoth and 
reindeer age. The rock-shelter of Cro-magnon ex- 
plored by Lartet is one of these, and that of Laugerie 
Basse Js on the opposite side of the same stream. 



52 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

The former is a shelter or hollow under an over- 
hanging ledge of limestone, and excavated originally 
by the action of the weather on a softer bed. It 
fronts the south-west, and, having originally been 
about eight feet high and nearly twenty deep, must 
have formed a comfortable shelter from rain or cold 
or summer sun, and with a pleasant outlook from its 
front. Being nearly fifty feet wide, it was capacious 
enough to accommodate several families, and when 
in use it no doubt had trees or shrubs in front, and 
may Ijave been further completed by stones, poles, or 
bark placed across the opening. It seems, however, 
in the first instance to have been used only at 
intervals, and to have been left vacant for consider- 
able portions of time. Perhaps it was visited only by 
hunting or w^ar-parties. But subsequently it was per- 
manently occupied, and this for so long a time that 
in some places a foot and a half of ashes and carbon- 
aceous matter, with bones, implements, &c., was 
accumulated. All of these, it may be remarked, 
belong to the palanthropic age. By this time the 
height of the cavern had been much diminished, and, 
instead of clearing it out for future use, it was made 
a place of burial, in which five individuals were 
interred. Of these, three were men, one of great age, 
the other two probably in the prime of life. The 
fourth and fifth were a woman of about thirty or 
forty years of age, and the remains of a foetus. 

These bones, with others to be mentioned in con- 
nection with them, unquestionably belong to some of 



THE PALANTHROPTC AGE 53 

the oldest human inhabitants known in Western 
Europe. They have been most carefully examined 
by several competent anatomists and archaeologists, 
and the results have been published with excellent 
figures in the ReliquicB Aquitanicce^ where will also be 
found details of their characters and accompaniments, 
among which last were about three hundred small 
shells of different species pierced for stringing or attach- 
ment to garments. These men are, therefore, of the 
utmost interest for our present purpose, and I shall 
try so to divest the descriptions of anatomical details 
as to give a clear notion of their character. The 
doubts at one time cast on the age of these skeletons 
have been removed by the discovery of others at 
Laugerie Basse, Mentone, &c. They are no doubt 
palanthropic, though not of the earliest part of the 
period. The ' Old Man of Cro-magnon ' was of 
great stature, being nearly six feet high. More than 
this, his bones show that he was of the strongest and 
most athletic muscular development ; and the bones 
of the limbs have the peculiar form which is charac- 
teristic of athletic men habituated to rough walking, 
climbing, and running ; for this is, I believe, the real 
meaning of the enormous strength of the thigh-bone 
and the flattened condition of the leg in this and 
other old skeletons. It occurs to some extent, 
though much less than in this old man, in American 
skeletons. His skull presents all the characters of 
advanced age, though the teeth had been worn down 
to the sockets without being lost ; which, again, is a 



54 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

character often observed in rude peoples of modern 
times. The skull proper, or brain-case, is very long 
— more so than in ordinary modern skulls — and this 
length is accompanied with a great breadth ; so that 
the brain was of greater size than in average modern 
men, and the frontal region was largely and well 




OUTLINE OF THE SKULL OF THE ' OLD MAN OF CRO-MAGNON ' 

(after Christy and Lartet) 

developed. The face, however, presented very pecu- 
liar characters. It was extremely broad, with project- 
ing cheek-bones and heavy jaw, in this resembling 
the coarse types of the American face, and the 
eye-orbits were square and elongated laterally in 
a manner peculiar to the skulls of this age. The 
nose was large and prominent, and the jaws projected 
somewhat forward. This man, therefore, had, as to 



THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 55 

his features, some resemblance to the harsher type of 
American physiognomy, with overhanging brows, 
small and transverse eyes, high cheek-bones, and 
coarse mouth. He had not lived to so great an age 
without some rubs, for his thigh-bone showed a de- 
pression which must have resulted from a severe 
wound — perhaps from the horn of some wild animal 
or the spear of an enemy. 

The woman presented similar characters of stature 
and cranial form modified by her sex, and in form 
and visage closely resembled her sisters of the 
American wilderness in the pre-Columbian times. 
If her hair and complexion were suitable, she would 
have passed at once for an American- Indian woman, 
but one of unusual size and development. Her head 
bears sad testimony to the violence of her age and 
people. She died from the effects of a blow from a 
stone-headed pogamogan or spear, which has pene- 
trated the right side of the forehead with so clean a 
fracture as to indicate the extreme rapidity and force 
of its blow. It is inferred from the condition of the 
edges of this wound that she may have survived its 
infliction for two weeks or more. If, as is most 
likely, the wound was received in some sudden 
attack by a hostile tribe, they must have been driven 
off or have retired, leaving the wounded woman in 
the hands of her friends to be tended for a time, 
and then buried, either with other members of her 
family or with others who had perished in the same 
skirmish. Unless the wound was inflicted in sleep, 



56 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

during a night attack, she must have fallen, not in 
flight, but with her face to the foe, perhaps aiding the 
resistance of her friends or shielding her little ones 
from destruction. With the people of Cro-magnon, 
as with the American Indians, the care of the 
wounded was probably a sacred duty, not to be 
neglected without incurring the greatest disgrace 
and the vengeance of the guardian spirits of the 
sufferers. 

Unreasonable doubts have been cast on the burial 
of the dead by palseocosmic men. The burial of men 
of the Cro-magnon race at that place and at Laugerie 
Basse and Mentone is established by the most un- 
equivocal evidence ; and interments of men of the 
Canstadt race have been found at Spy, in Belgium. 
Of course, even if interment proper had not been 
practised, there might have been cremation, as 
among the Tasmanians, or burial on stages or in 
huts, as among some American Indians. Still, that 
interment was practised we know, and this carries 
with it the certainty that our palaeocosmic men must 
have had some simple ideas of religion. 

The skulls of these people have been compared to 
those of the modern Esthonians or Lithuanians ; but 
on the authority of M. Quatrefages it is stated that, 
while this applies to the probably later race of smaller 
men found in some of the Belgian caves, it does not 
apply so well to the people of Cro-magnon. Are, 
then, these people the types of any ancient, or of the 
most ancient, European race ? The answer is that 




THE FIRST SKELETON FOUND IN THE MENTONE CAVES 

(after Riviere) 



58 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

they are types of the cave men of the mammoth 
age in Europe. Another example is the remarkable 
skeleton of Mentone, in the south of France, found 
under circumstances equally suggestive of great anti- 
quity. Dr. Riviere, in a memoir on this skeleton, 
illustrated by two beautiful photographs, shows that 
the characters of the skull and of the bones of the 
limbs are similar to those of the Cro-magnon skeleton, 
indicating a perfect identity of race, while the objects 
found with the skeleton are similar in character. 
I had an opportunity of verifying his description by 
an examination of the skeleton in the Museum of the 
Jardin des Plantes, in 1883 5 ^-^^^ more recent dis- 
coveries at Mentone have confirmed the conclusion 
that this man really represents a race of giants, some 
of them seven feet high, who inhabited Southern 
Europe in the palanthropic age. A similar skeleton 
found by Carthaillac, at Laugerie Basse, was buried 
under a great thickness of accumulated debris of 
cookery, as well as of large stones fallen fmm above. 
This skeleton had its shell ornaments in place on the 
forehead, arms, legs and feet, in a manner which 
would induce the belief that they had been attached 
to a head-dress, sleeves, leggings, and shoes or mo- 
casins. (See illustration on p. 79.) 

The ornaments of Cro-magnon were perforated 
shells from the Atlantic and pieces of ivory. Those 
at Mentone were perforated NerztincE from the Medi- 
terranean and canine teeth of the deer. In both 
cases there was evidence that these ancient people 



6o GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

painted themselves with red oxide of iron, and used 
bodkins of bone, and long and beautifully-formed 
flint knives, perhaps for dividing their food, or perhaps 
for sacrificial purposes. Skulls found at Clichy and 
Crenelle in 1868 and 1869 are described by Professor 
Broca and M. Fleurens as of the same general type, 
and the remains found at Gibraltar and in the cave 
of Paviland, in England, seem also to have belonged 
to this race. The celebrated Engis skull from one of 



NEANDERTHAL SKULL— TWO OUTLINES : THE OUTER 

GIVING THE MORE CORRECT FORM (from Science) 



the Belgian caves, which is believed to have belonged 
to a contemporary of the mammoth, is also of this 
type, though less massive than that of Cro magnon ; 
and lastly, even the somewhat degraded Neanderthal 
skull, found in a cave near Dlisseldorf, though, like 
those of Clichy, Canstadt, Spy and Cibraltar, inferior 
in frontal development, is referable to the same pe- 
culiar long-headed style of man, in so far as can be 
judged from the portion that remains, though cer- 
tainly to a ruder and more degraded variety, com- 



THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 6i 

monly known as the Canstadt man as distinguished 
from the Engis or Cro-magnon. 

Let it be observed, then, that these skulls are 
probably the oldest known in the world, and they are 
all referable to two varieties of one race of men ; and 
let us ask what they tell as to the position and 
character of palanthropic man. The testimony is 
here fortunately well-nigh unanimous. All anatomists 




SKULL OF CANSTADT TYPE FOUND AT SFY, BELGIUM, 

BY Fkaipont and LOHEST 



and archaeologists admit the high and human cha- 
racter of the Engis and even the Neanderthal skulls. 
Broca, who has carefully studied the Cro-magnon 
skulls, has the following general conclusions : ' The 
great volume of the brain, the development of 
the frontal region, the fine elliptical profile of 
the anterior portion of the skull, and the orthogna- 
thous form of the upper facial region, are incontest- 
ably evidences of superiority, which are met with 
usually only in the civilised races. On the other 



62 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

hand, the great breadth of face, the alveolar progna- 
thism, the enormous development of the ascending 
ramus of the lower jaw, the extent and roughness of 
the muscular insertions, especially of the masticatory 
muscles, give rise to the idea of a violent and brutal 
race/ 

He adds that this apparent antithesis, seen also 
in the limbs as well as in the skull, accords with the 
evidence furnished by the associated weapons and 
implements of a rude hunter-life, and at the same 
time of no mean degree of taste and skill in carving 
and other arts. He might have added that this is 
the antithesis seen in the American tribes, among 
whom art and taste of various kinds, and much that 
is high and spiritual even in thought, coexisted with 
barbarous modes of life and intense ferocity and 
cruelty. The god and the devil were combined in 
these races, but there was nothing of the mere 
brute. 

Riviere remarks, with expressions of surprise, the 
same contradictory points in the Mentone skeleton : 
its grand development of brain-case and high facial 
angle — even higher apparently than in most of 
these ancient skulls — combined with other characters 
which indicate a low type and barbarous modes of 
life. 

Another point which strikes us in reading the 
descriptions of these skeletons is the indication 
which they seem to present of an extreme longevity. 
The massive proportions of the body, the great 



THE PALAN7HR0PIC AGE 63 

development of the muscular processes, the extreme 
wearing of the teeth among a people who pre- 
dominantly lived on flesh and not on grain, the 
obliteration of the sutures of the skull, along with 
indications of slow ossification of the ends of the long 
bones, point in this direction, and seem to indicate a 
slow maturity and great length of life in this most 
primitive race. 

The picture would be incomplete did we not add 
that Quatrefages has described a single skull, that of 
Truchere, from deposits of this age, which shows 
that these gigantic men were contemporaneous with 
a feebler race of smaller stature and with different 
cranial characters, and inhabiting in all likelihood a 
more eastern region. 

It is further significant that there is evidence to 
show that the larger and stronger race was that which 
prevailed in Europe at the time of its greatest elevation 
above the sea and greatest horizontal extent, and 
when its fauna included many large quadrupeds now 
extinct. This race of giants was thus in the posses- 
sion of a greater continental area than that now 
existing, and had to contend with gigantic brute 
rivals for the possession of the world. It is also not 
improbable that this early race became extinct in 
Europe in consequence of the physical changes which 
occurred in connection with the subsidence that 
reduced the land to its present limits, and that the 
feebler race which succeeded came in as the appro- 
priate accompaniment of a diminished land-surface 



64 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

and a less genial climate in the early historic period. 
The older races are those usually classed as palaeolithic, 
and are supposed to antedate the period of polished 
stone ; but this may, to some extent, be a prejudice 
of collectors, who have arrived at a foregone conclu- 
sion as to distinctions of this kind. Judging from 
the great cranial capacity of the older race and the 
small number of their skeletons found, it might be fair 
to suppose that they represent rude outlying tribes 
belonging to nations which elsewhere had attained 
to greater population and culture. 

Lastly, all of these old European races were 
Turanian, Mongolian, or American in their head-forms 
and features, as well as in their habits, implements, 
and arts. In other words, their nearest affinities were 
with races of men which in the modern world are the 
oldest and most widely distributed. 

The reader, reflecting on what he has learned 
from history, may be disposed here to ask, Must 
we suppose Adam to have been one of these 
Turanian men, like the ' Old Man of Cro-magnon ' ? In 
answer, I would say that there is no good reason to 
regard the first man as having resembled a Greek 
Apollo or an Adonis. He was probably of sterner 
and more muscular mould. But he was probably 
more akin to the more delicate and refined race 
represented by the solitary skull of Truchere, while 
the gigantic palseocosmic men of the European caves 
are more likely to have been representatives of 
that terrible and powerful race who filled the ante- 



THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 65 

diluvian world with violence, and who reappear in 
postdiluvian times as the Anakim and traditional 
giants, who constitute a feature in the early history of 
so many countries. Perhaps nothing is more curious 
in the revelations as to the most ancient cave men 
than that they confirm the old belief that there were 
'giants in those days.' At the same time we must 
bear in mind that the more diminutive race which 
survived must have existed previously in some part of 
the world, and must have furnished the survivors of 
the succeeding subsidence (see illustration on p. 82). 

And now let us pause for a moment to picture 
these so-called palaeolithic men. What could the ' Old 
Man of Cro-magnon ' have told us, had we been able 
to sit by his hearth and listen understandingly to his 
speech ? — which, if we may judge from the form of 
his palate-bones, must have resembled more that of 
the Americans or Mongolians than of any modern 
European people. He had, no doubt, travelled far, 
for to his stalwart limbs a long journey through 
forests and over plains and mountains would be a 
mere pastime. He may have bestridden the wild 
horse, which seems to have abounded at the time in 
France, and he may have launched his canoe on the 
waters of the Atlantic. His experience and memory 
might extend back a century or more, and his tradi- 
tional lore might go back to the times of the first 
mother of our race. Did he live in that wide post- 
pliocene continent which extended westward through 
Ireland } Did he know and had he visited the more 

E 



66 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

cultuerd naitons that lived in the great plains of the 
Mediterranean Valley, or on that nameless river which 
flowed through the land now covered by the German 
Ocean ? Had he visited or seen from afar the great 
island Atlantis, w^hose inhabitants could almost see 
in the sunset sky the islands of the blest ? Could he 
have told us of the huge animals of the antediluvian 
world, and of the feats of the men of renown who 
contended with these animal giants ? We can but 
conjecture all this. But, mute though they may be 
as to the details of their lives, the man of Cro-magnon 
and his contemporaries are eloquent of one great 
truth, in which they coincide with the Americans and 
with the primitive men of all the early ages. They 
tell us that primitive man had the same high cerebral 
organisation which he possesses now, and, we may 
infer, the same high intellectual and moral nature, 
fitting him for communion with God and headship 
over the lower world. They indicate also, like the 
mound-builders, who preceded the North American 
Indian, that man's earlier state was the best — that he 
had been a high and noble creature before he became 
a savage. It is not conceivable that their high 
development of brain and mind could have sponta- 
neously engrafted itself on a mere brutal and savage 
life. These gifts must be remnants of a noble 
organisation degraded by moral evil. They thus 
justify the tradition of a Golden and Edenic Age, 
and mutely protest against the philosophy of progres- 
sive development as applied to man, while they bear 



THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 67 

witness to the similarity in all important characters of 
the oldest prehistoric men with that variety of our 
species which is at the present day at once the most 
widely extended and the most primitive in its manners 
and usages.' 

' Perhaps no feature of this early human age is more remark- 
able than its artistic productions. Recent testimony, more especially 
that of the very careful explorers of the deposits at Spy, in Belgium, 
seems to show existence of the potter's art, though this until lately 
was denied. These people ornamented their clothing with pearly and 
coloured shells, and made beautiful necklaces. We have already 
noticed that found in the cave of Goyet. At Sordes, in the Pyrenees, 
in a very old interment of this period, there was a necklace of forty- 
three teeth of the cave lion and cave bear, carved with figures of 
animals (see p. 71). The handle of a piercer, represented on p. 59, 
is a marvel of skilful adaptation of an animal form to produce a handle 
fitted to be firmly and conveniently grasped by the human hand. The 
figure of the mammoth on p. 68 shows how a few bold lines may 
produce a vigorous and truthful sketch ; and multitudes of such carvings 
and drawings have been found in France as well as in Germany and 
Belgium. Even the chipping of flint is an art requiring much skill to 
produce the fine knives, spears, &c., so commonly found, and there is 
evidence that these were fitted into strong and probably artistic handles. 
All this and much more testifies to the fact that our palseocosmic men 
were no mean artists as well as artificers. 



E2 




< W 

w 
> 
pi) 

H 
O 



CHAPTER V 

SUBDIVISIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE 
PALANTHROPIC AGE 

While all geologists and archaeologists are agreed 
in the existence of the men contemporary with the 
mammoth and reindeer in Europe, and in the fact of 
two or even three races of men having existed in that 
period, various opinions are entertained as to the 
succession of events and the chronological classifi- 
cation of the remains. Mortillet, whose arrangement 
has been usually adopted in France, recognises a 
period of chipped stone or palaeolithic period, corre- 
sponding to the palanthropic age, and a period of 
polished stone, corresponding to the neanthropic age. 
Within the former he believes that it is possible to 
separate different ages,^ from the character of the 
implements and other remains. The first two are 
characterised by the presence of two elephants, the 
mammoth and another species {E. antiquus)^ the next 
two by the mammoth associated with the cave bear 

' Respectively the Achulienne, Chellienne, Mousterienne, Solou- 
trienne, and Magdalenienne. 



70 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

and reindeer, the last by the nearly entire pre- 
dominance of the reindeer. Dupont is content in 
Belgium to recognise a mammoth age and a reindeer 
age, but the latter perhaps includes some deposits 
which are properly neanthropic. 

Carthaillac places the whole palanthropic age as 
quaternary, properly so-called, which he separates 
from the tertiary on the one hand and the modern 
on the other, and divides his quaternary into two 
stages, the first characterised by E. antiquus and 
Mortillet's Chellean men, the second by the mammoth 
and reindeer — the earlier of these two periods being 
warm and moist, the latter cold and dry. The table 
appended to this chapter is modified from those of 
Carthaillac. Dawkins, while admitting a similar two- 
fold division, calls the earlier men those of the river 
gravels, the latter those of the caves. 

This twofold division of the palanthropic age 
requires some consideration. In the first place, there 
is reason to believe that the Canstadt race locally 
preceded that of Cro-magnon. I say locally, for no 
one supposes that they are distinct species, and as 
varietal forms they may have originated from a 
common intermediate ancestor, or the humbler race 
may be the earlier, and the higher race an improvement 
on it, or the lower race may have been a degraded 
type of the higher. Probably also there was a third, 
the Truchere race, and the Cro-magnon race may 
have been a half-breed or metis progeny. 

Again, there was an undoubted change of fauna 



SUBDIVISIONS AND CONDITIONS 71 

within the palanthropic age, and this dependent on 
or accompanied by a change of cHmate. The earlier 
elephant of the period (E. antiquus) and its companion 
animals are believed to have been suited to a warm 
climate, and to have entered Europe from the south- 
east. With, or immediately after, them came man, 
and this conclusion harmonises with human phy- 
siology, for we know that man must have originated 
in a warm climate, and must in the first place have 
been a feeder on fruits and grains or other nutritious 




TOOril OF CAVE BEAR, WITH ENGRAVING OF A SEAL, FROM A 

COLLAR FOUND AT SORDES, PYRENEES (after Carthailkc) 

vegetable products. In this early stage he would 
be nearly destitute of implements and weapons. But 
in the succeeding cold period, one tribe after another 
might be obliged to resort to hunting habits, to the 
use of fire and of clothing, and of natural and arti- 
ficial shelter. Hence the peculiarities of the cave 
men, who, while they advanced in art, may have also 
advanced in ferocity and warlike habits, under the 
pressure of necessity and competition. Hence also 
their association more and more closely with such 



72 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

animals as the reindeer, the hairy mammoth, and the 
woolly rhinoceros, while the previous species had 
migrated to the south or perished. Thus it would 
appear that the men of the mammoth age may not be 
really the most primitive men, but a derivative from 
them under pressure of a severe climate. This possi- 
bility may be summed up as follows. If the early 
part of the post-glacial or palanthropic era was 
characterised by a milder climate than its later period, 
this may have had much to do with the change in 
implements and weapons. The earliest men probably 
subsisted merely on natural fruits and other vegetable 
productions. To secure these in a mild climate they 
would require no implements, except perhaps to dig 
for roots or to crack nuts. If they migrated into a 
colder climate, or if the climate became more severe, 
they might be obliged to become hunters and fisher- 
men, and would invent new implements and weapons, 
not because they had advanced in civilisation, but, as 
Lamech has it in Genesis, ' because of the ground 
which the Lord had cursed,' and which would no 
longer yield food to them. At the same time they 
might contend with one another for the most sheltered 
and productive stations, and so war might further 
stimulate that very questionable advance in civilisa- 
tion which consists in the improvement of weapons of 
destruction. We have much to learn as to these 
matters ; but we must, if we have any regard to phy- 
siology and to natural probability, start from the idea 
that the most primitive men were frugivorous and 



SUBDIVISIONS AND CONDITIONS 73 

fitted for a mild climate. In this case we should 
expect that these earliest men would leave behind 
them scarcely any weapons or implements except 
of the simplest kind, and that their apparent pro- 
gress in the arts of war and the chase might in 
reality be evidence, up to a certain point at least, of 
increasing barbarism. Primitive as well as modern 
men present in these respects strange paradoxes. 

We have to inquire in the sequel as to the cause 
of the final disappearance of the palaeocosmic men, 
and as to the question whether history is cognisant of 
any such human period as that which has occupied us 
in this chapter, or whether, as has sometimes been 
assumed, it is altogether prehistoric. 

On the subject of the correlation of the French 
and Belgian discoveries as to primitive man, a most 
interesting and important communication was made 
by Dupont to the Geological Society of Belgium in 
1892.^ The veteran explorer of the Belgian caves 
addresses himself in this paper to a careful comparison 
of the geological relations, animal remains and human 
relics in these caves, and in the gravels and ' quater- 
nary ' clays associated with them. He arrives at the 
conclusion, which I had already stated,^ that these 
deposits are contemporaneous and show similar 
stages, but that the mammoth age properly so-called, 
in which the primitive people fed on the mam- 

' Bulletin de la Sociefe Beige de Geologie, Janvier 1893. This paper 
should be studied by all interested in the subject. 
- Fossil Men. 



74 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

moth and its companion the woolly rhinoceros, ex- 
tended to a later date in Belgium than in France, 
so that the mamimoth age of Dupont and the rein- 
deer age of the French archaeologists overlap one 
another. He notes in connection with this that there 
is evidence of the continued existence of the mammoth 
in the so-called reindeer age of France, in the dis- 
covery in caves of that period of plates of ivory with 
the portrait of the mammoth engraved on them. It 
would therefore appear either that the mammoth 
earlier became extinct or rare in France, perhaps on 
account of climatal change.'^, or perhaps because of 
destruction by man, or that the habits of the French 
populations changed in such a way as to cause them 
to confine themselves to smaller game. In either 
case, we now find that the whole palanthropic age is 
one period. On the other hand, Dupont agrees with 
Mortillet that there is a hiatus, physical, palseonto. 
logical and anthropological, between the so-called 
palaeolithic and neolithic periods, that is, between the 
palanthropic and neanthropic ages. 

Dupont holds that the plain-dvvellers {Pediono- 
mytes, as he calls them) were the earliest known men, 
corresponding to the oldest gravel remains of Dawkins 
and Prestwich, and points out that their implements 
are in size and form, though not in material and finish, 
allied to those of the polished stone age, which 
might thus be regarded as an improved continuation 
or revival of this first period. This might be read to 
mean, as above maintained, that the earliest men were 



SUBDIVISIONS AND CONDITIONS 75 

peaceful and perhaps in part agricultural, that they 
were succeeded by lawless, powerful, artistic and 
savage peoples, and when the latter were swept away 
that a remnant of the primitive stock repossessed the 
land. If this proves to be the net result, it will 
correspond exactly with our old historical beliefs. 

I was struck in reading this paper with a remark 
of Dupont on the unprogressive character of the men 
of the mammoth age, who seem to have made so little 
advance in the arts of life during the period of their 
occupation of Europe. Perhaps he makes too great 
an estimate of the length of their residence, or does 
not sufficiently consider how long men about their 
stage of civilisation have remained at the same point 
in the historic period. Nor does he consider the 
possibility of the cave men belonging to ruder tribes 
of a race which may have inhabited better if more 
perishable residences elsewhere. In any case, all 
experience shows that to such a people any great 
advance in the arts could come only by missionary 
influence from abroad, or by the appearance of some 
great inventive genius among themselves ; and no 
good fortune of this kind seems to have happened to 
the Canstadt or Cro-magnon men, or if it did, they 
rejected their opportunity, as so many others have 
since done. 

Still, perhaps, we need not pity them too much. 
They lived in a young and fresh condition of the 
earth, enjoyed a vigorous health, and were gifted with 
rare strength and energy. They were bountifully 



76 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

provided for by nature as to food and clothing, were 
in slavery to no man, lived in families bound together 
by ties of affection, and were free to migrate over vast 
territories according to the exigencies of the seasons. 
They had some taste in dress and ornaments, and no 
doubt enjoyed their clever carvings on bone and ivory 
as much as any modern lovers of art their most 
finished treasures. A Cro-magnon * brave,' tall, mus- 
cular and graceful in movement, clad in well-dressed 
skins, ornamented with polished shells and ivory pen- 
dants, with a pearly shell helmet, probably decked 
with feathers, and armed with his flint-headed lance 
and skull-cracker of reindeer antler handsomely 
carved, must have been a somewhat noble savage, and 
he must have rejoiced in the chase of the mammoth, 
the rhinoceros, the bison, and the wild horse and 
reindeer, and in launching his curiously-constructed 
harpoons against the salmon and other larger fish that 
haunted the rivers. 

Nor was he destitute of higher hopes. He laid 
his dead reverently in the bosom of mother earth, 
with such things as had been pleasant or useful in life, 
and his rudimentary bible, or ' book of the dead,' must 
have at least included the idea — 'This corruptible 
shall put on incorruption, this mortal immortality.* 
That is the meaning of such funeral gifts in every 
part of the world, and has always been so, as far as we 
can learn. But the belief in immortality implies also 
a belief in a God or gods. For if there is a spiritual 
world for the dead, there must be a Power to care for 



SUBDIVISIONS AND CONDITIONS 77 

them there. Whether these beliefs were originally 
implanted in him when God breathed into his nostrils 
the breath of life, or were taught to him by special 
revelation, we do not know, but they were there as a 
foundation on which he could, with the aid of his 
sense of right and wrong, build a happy and harmless 
life. That he did not always do so we have some sad 
evidence, to be gathered even from his bones ; and 
the testimony of tradition is that his great sin was 
that of inhuman vioknce, and it was for this that he 
was swept away by the Flood, and replaced by men of 
more peaceful mould, whom but for that catastrophe 
he would soon have annihilated. 

Carthaillac ^ devotes a chapter to the mortuary 
customs of the men of the quaternary (palanthropic) 
age. He shows that the statement sometimes made 
that these men did not care for the dead is entirely 
incorrect, though he believes that we know com- 
paratively little of their burials, owing to the circum- 
stance that only those in caverns were likely to be 
preserved or discovered. The discoveries at Spy, in 
Belgium, show that even the Canstadt race, the lowest 
in development, and probably in art, interred the 
bodies of their dead, while a large number of inter- 
ments of the Cro-magnon race are known. He calls 
attention to the fact that in all of these the body lies 
on its side. The hands are brought up to the head 
or neck, and the knees are bent, sometimes slightly, 
sometimes very strongly, so as to give the body a 

' Homme Frehisiorique. 



78 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

crouching posture (p. 79). The idea seems to have 
been to place the body in the attitude of sleep or 
of rest. The deceased was arrayed in the gar- 
ments and ornaments worn during life, and not in- 
frequently a quantity of red oxide of iron was buried 
with, or has been scattered over, the body. Flint 
knives and lances seem often to have been placed with 
the dead. It is needless to say that all this recalls 
the burial customs of many rude tribes of men up to 
modern times. 

There is some reason to believe that occasionally, 
at least, the flesh has been partially removed from 
the bones before interment. This reminds us of the 
custom of some American tribes, who were in the 
habit of disinterring the dead after a temporary burial, 
carefully cleaning the bones, and then placing them 
wrapped in skins in their tribal ossuaries. It would 
seem, however, that the primitive men when they 
removed the flesh did so in a recent state. Perhaps 
this practice was resorted to only when the body had 
to be kept for some time, or carried some distance for 
interment. If the body was disembowelled and the 
remaining flesh and ligaments dried, it would be 
reduced very nearly to the condition of the imperfect 
mummies of the Guanches of the Canaries and of the 
Peruvians. Thus we may suppose that we have here 
a rudimentary condition of the art of the embalmer. 

Some questions still remain as to the races of men 
actually known to us in the palanthropic age. It 
has already been explained that in the earliest part of 



SUBDIVISIONS AND CONDITIONS 



79 



this period, that characterised by the presence of the 
Elephas antiquus in Europe, there are evidences of 
the existence of man, and this in a more genial 




THE SKELETON OF LAUGERIE BASSE, DORDOGNE, SHOWING 
THE POSITION OF THE PERFORATED SHELLS ON THE LIMBS 

AND FOREHEAD (after Carthaillac) 

chmate than that prevailing later. Of these men we 
have no certain osseous remains. Should these be 
found, we may anticipate that their characters would 



So GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

be peculiar, and would indicate a frugivorous rather 
than a carnivorous mode of life, and less of rude 
power than that evidenced by the Canstadt and Cro- 
magnon races. 

Of the latter, though both are of the same faunal 
period, and thciefore geologically contemporaneous, 
the former, the lower of the two in point of physical 
development, is apparently in Western Europe the 
older, and represents the earlier part of the mammoth 
age, when the climate had become cooler and ElcpJias 
priniigenius had succeeded to E. antiquus. The Cro- 
magnon race, beginning in this period, goes on to the 
close of the mammoth age, which, as already stated, 
coincides with the reindeer age of the French arch- 
aeologists. This Cro-m^agnon race I am disposed to 
regard as a mixed or half-breed tribe, produced by the 
union of the Canstadt peoples with the higher race 
already hinted at. This last may possibly be repre- 
sented by a few skulls more resembling those of the 
men of the neanthropic age, which are occasionaRy 
found in the burials of the Cro-magnon people, and 
of which that found at Truchere has been already 
referred to. 

We have thus traces of two primitive or ante- 
diluvian races, one probably mild and subsisting on 
vegetable food, and another fierce, rude and car- 
nivorous, perhaps a product of degeneracy of the 
former; and a third, or mixed race, of greater physical 
power and energy than either of the others. This is 
of course merely a hypothetical reading of the facts, 



SUBDIVISIONS AND CONDITIONS 8i 

but it is by no means improbable, and would, as we 
shall see, bring them into close relation with the 
teachings of history and tradition as to the antediluvian 
age. 

The most careful and elaborate studies of these 
several types have been made by MM. Quatrefages 
and Hamy. The former sums up the races of fossil 
or ' quaternary ' men as six in number, viz. : (i) The 
Canstadt ; (2) the Cro-magnon ; (3) the mesito- 
cephalic race of Furfooz ; (4) the sub-brachycephalic 
race of Furfooz ; (5) the race of Crenelle ; (6) the 
race of Truchere. Of these only three (namely, Nos. I, 
2, and 6) properly belong to the palanthropic age. 
The races of Furfooz • and of the upper beds of 
Crenelle are neanthropic, because they are found 
with the animal remains of that age, and they 
resemble in cranial characters the neanthropic 
peoples. 

The Canstadt and Cro-magnon races resemble 
each other in being long-headed or dolichocephalic, 
and in having strong and coarsely-made facial bones, 
but the Canstadt race lias a comparatively low fore- 
head with strong superciliary arches, and round eye- 
sockets. The Cro-magnon race has a brain-case of 
more than ordinary capacity, a more elevated fore- 
head, and eye-sockets singularly elongated horizon- 
tally. Broca has measured the cubic contents of the 
Cro-magnon skull, and gives as the resiilt 1,590 cubic 
centimetres, or 1 19 centimetres more than the average 

* Noticed later, in Chapter VII. 

F 



32 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

of 125 modern Parisian skulls. The Canstadt men 
were of moderate stature, but strongly built and 




SKULL FROM TRUCHfeRE, SHOWING A PECULIAR PALANTHROPIC 

TYPE ALLIED TO NEANTHROPic RACES (after Quatrefages) 

muscular. The Cro-magnon race was of great stature, 
some skeletons approaching to seven feet in height, 



SUBDIVISIONS AND CONDITIONS 83 

and affording evidence of immense muscular develop- 
ment 

The race of Truchere is represented by only a 
single skull ; but Quatrefages vouches for it as be- 
longing to the age of the mammoth. It is a well- 
formed brachycephalic cranium of unusually great 
internal capacity, and would be regarded anywhere 
as indicating a race of high and refined cerebral 
endowment. If really of the mammoth age, it may 
have belonged to a straggler or captive from a higher 
and more cultured tribe, introduced accidentally into 
a sepulchre of the Cro-magnon period. It connects 
itself with the speculation in the preceding pages 
as to the existence of such a race. This skull 
resembles, as we should expect, the type of the 
neanthropic men who spread over the earth at the 
beginning of that later age. 



F 2 



84 



GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



I 


Recent 
Roman 
Gaulish 
Iberian 


Magdalenian 
Soloutrian 
Mousterian 
Chellean 


1 ' 

o 

I 


1 


So-called of Iron, 
Bronze, and Pol- 
ished Stone 


So-called palseo- 
lithic or Age of 
Chipped Stone 


<u 
o 

o 

12; 


c 


Modern quadru- 
peds, including 
domestic ani- 
mals 


Reindeer, mam- 
moth (Elephas 
Drimigenius), 
lairy rhinoceros 
(R. tichorhinus), 
&c. 

Elephas antiquus 
and R. Merkii 


G 

a 
< 


Elephas meridion- 
alis. Rhinoceros 
leptorhinus, and 
other extinct 
mammals 


g 

o 

c 

1 


The actual climate 
and geographical 
arrangements 


Cold and dry, with 
widely extended 
continents. Ex- 
tension of gla- 
ciers 

Warm and moist, 
extended con- 
tinents 


Glacial period. Sub- 
mergence and 
diminished con- 
tinents 


First continental 

period 
Mild climate 


U5 

.1 

8 
o 


£ 2 


S.2 


Pleistocene or 
glacial 


<u 
c 



Later 



cenozoic 



CHAPTER VI 

END OF THE PALANTHKOPIC AGE 

The palanthropic age came to a tragic end, and Is 
somewhat definitely separated from that which suc- 
ceeded it. This appears from several considerations 
which are too often overlooked by writers who have a 
prejudice in favour of everything passing imperceptibly 
and by slow degrees into that by which it is followed 
— an exaggerated uniformitarianism beyond that of 
Lyell, but in harmony with the hypothesis of Darwin, 
to which many anthropologists appear to tie them- 
selves hopelessly. 

" Three facts are here specially important. The 
Canstadt and Cro-magnon races are physically 
different from any modern races, and give place at 
the close of this age to peoples as distinct from them 
as any now existing, and who, on the other hand, 
while separated from the palaeocosmic men preceding 
them, are linked with the races of modern times. It 
is no doubt true that occasional and abnormal 
human skulls may to this day be seen on living men 
which are more or less of the Canstadt or Cro-magnon 



86 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

type. These are good evidences of the unity of man 
through all the ages, but no race exists having all 
the peculiarities of these ancient peoples, which thus 
belong not to a distinct species but to a distinct racial 
variety of man. 

Secondly, at the close of the palanthropic age we 
find a great change in land animals — a number of 
important species hunted by early man having dis- 
appeared, and the more meagre modern fauna having 
come in at once. Thus it may be affirmed that the 
land fauna of this primitive time was distinct from 
that now living. This implies either long time or a 
great physical break. 

Thirdly, this change of fauna consists not so much 
in the introduction of new species as in the extinction of 
old forms, either absolutely or locally ; and this agrees 
with the fact of diminution of land area, since it seems 
to be a law of the geological succession that increas- 
ing land brings in new land animals ; diminishing 
land area leads to extinction, and not to introduction. 

Fourthly, in accordance with this we find that, at 
the close of the palanthropic age, the continents of the 
northern hemisphere experienced a subsidence from 
which they have only partially recovered up to the 
present time, and which introduced the modern 
geographical and climatal features. This appears 
from raised beaches and beds of rubble, loam and 
loess of modern date overlying the debris of the 
glacial period and holding the remains of post-glacial 
animals. " These are widely spread over the whole 



END OF IHE PALANTHROPIC AGE 87 

northern hemisphere, and ascend in some districts to 
high levels. An interesting illustration has recently 
been given by Dr. Nuesch and M. Boule, in the 
deposits under a rock-shelter at Schweizersbild, near 
Schaffhausen.^ These show an overlying deposit 
with ' neolithic ' implements and bones of recent 
animals, a bed of rubble and loam destitute of human 
remains, and below this a bed containing bone imple- 
ments, worked flints, and traces of cookery of the 
palanthropic period. The whole rests on a bed of 
rolled pebbles, supposed to be the upper part of the 
glacial deposits. This shows the interval between 
the palanthropic and neanthropic periods, and also 
the post-glacial date of man in Switzerland, and it 
accords with a great m.any other instances. 

Were these changes sudden or gradual } Ex- 
perience has no answer, for no similar events have 
occurred in historic times, and though there are 
records in the geological history of many mutations 
in the elevation of the land, we have no information 
as to their rate of progress, and we know little of their 
causes. The changes of this kind known to us in 
modern times are merely local, not general, and in 
regard to their rate are of two kinds. Some are 
abrupt and accompanied with earthquake shocks. 
These are very local, and usually occur in regions of 
volcanic activity. Others are so slow and gradual 
as to be scarcely perceptible, and are often of wider 

^ Notivelles archives des Missions, &c. \ol. iii. Noticed in 
Natural Science^ 1S93. 



88 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

distribution. It is evident, however, that these sh'ght 
and local phenomena furnish but little clue to the 
mutations of past periods. These were on a far 
grander scale and affected vast areas. We have no 
modern instances of these almost world-wide de- 
pressions of continents under the sea, though we 
know that these have occurred, one of them within 
the human period, and it is idle to speculate as to 
their rate or duration in the absence of facts. We 
know pretty certainly, however, from the gauges of 
time which can be applied to the close of the glacial 
period, that this latest subsidence must have occurred 
within six thousand years of our time. 

With reference to the particular movement in 
question, we know that the close of the palanthropic 
period was accompanied by a movement at least 
equal to the difference between the wide lands of the 
second continental period and the shrunken dimen- 
sions of the present lands. Besides this we find on 
the surface of the land modern raised beaches, depo- 
sits of loess and plateau gravels, intrusions of mud 
into caves of considerable elevation, and evidences, 
as in Siberia, of large herds of animals perishing 
on elevated lands on which they seem to have taken 
refuge.^ In short, no geological fact can be better 
established than the post-glacial subsidence. 

' Prestwich, 'Evidence of Submergence of Western Europe,' Trans. 
Royal Society^ 1893 ; ' Possible Cause for the Origin of the Tradition of 
thePlood,' Trans, Vict. Inst., i^C)^\D2iwk\n'>, Jour )ial Ant krop. Bzst., 
February 1894. Kingsmill and S\i&x\.ch\y [Nature, November 10, 1892) 
report the Asiatic loess to be marine, and to extend far upward on the 



END OF THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 89 

Putting these facts together, we cannot doubt 
that the submergence at the close of the palanthropic 
age was very considerable, and that it was followed 
by a partial re-cmergence. Further, there is no 
evidence of any serious fractures or folding of the 
crust taking place at the time, though it is possible 
that great lava ejections like some of those of 
Western America may belong to this period. It is 
therefore allowable to suppose that the cause of sub- 
mergence may have been either depression of the 
land, or elevation of the bed of the ocean throwing 
its waters over the land, or possibly a combination 
of both. Movements of these kinds have recurred 
again and again in geological time.. Their causes 
are mysterious, but their effects have been of the 
most stupendous character. Fortunately, they occur 
at rare intervals, and that to which we are now 
referring is the last of which we have any record, and 
differs from all others in having occurred at a time 
when man was widely spread over the world. 

The geological chronometers already referred to 
inform us that the land of the northern hemisphere 
rose from the great pleistocene submergence about 
eight thousand to ten thousand years ago, and the 
second continental period, with its forests and its 
teeming and widely-extended animal and human 
life,- may have been established within two thousand 

Caspian plain and the Pamirs, so that all Asia must have been sub- 
merged within a very recent period. See also Fossil Man, by the 
author, 1880. 



90 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

years of that time, or say six thousand to eight 
thousand years ago. How long the second conti- 
nental or palanthropic period continued intact we 
do not know, but we can scarcely allow it less than 
two thousand years. Perhaps it was considerably 
longer. Now on historical evidence produced by 
Egypt, Chaldea, and other ancient countries in the 
Mediterranean region, we can trace the neanthropic 
age continuously back to, say, three thousand years B.C., 
or nearly five thousand years in all. Adding to this 
two thousand years for the palanthropic age, we are 
carried back to a time within one thousand years of 
the earliest we can assign on geological grounds to 
the termination of the great glacial period. There- 
fore, unless we suppose the last continental subsidence 
to have begun some time before the close of the 
palanthropic age, and to have continued to some 
degree into the beginning of the neanthropic, we 
cannot assign to it a very long time. That it could 
not have been sudden in the sense of being instan- 
taneous is evident, because in that case terrestrial 
denudation of a stupendous character must have 
ensued, and no animal life except that of mountain 
tops and elevated table-lands could have escaped its 
destructive effects, but that it was by no means 
secular or long-continued is certain. 

Thus we seem shut up to the conclusion that 
the close of the palanthropic age was marked by 
great geological vicissitudes of the character of sub- 
mergence, leading primarily to vast destruction of 



END OF THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 91 

animal life, and secondarily to permanent changes 
both in geography and climate, under which new 
conditions the neanthropic age was inaugurated. 
How this took place we have to inquire in the 
sequel. In the meantime we may merely remark 
that since the two principal races of primitive men 
known to us in Europe seem to have perished, we 
must infer that individuals of a third race beyond the 
limits of Europe were destined to survive, and again 
to replenish the earth in the new era, and that 
possibly these may be represented by the solitary 
Truchere skull. In the case of many of the more 
bulky and unwieldy animals inhabiting the plains the 
case was different. They perished, or if any sur- 
vived the submergence they were unable to multiply 
under the new conditions. 

Desperate attempts have been made in the 
interests of extreme uniformitarianism to discredit 
the abrupt change from palaeocosmic to neocosmic 
men. It has been supposed that the latter replaced 
the former as conquerors- a most unlikely theory, 
when their relative powers are considered. It has 
been conjectured that as the cold decreased the old 
races of men followed the reindeer to the north 
and became Arctic peoples. But why did they 
not rather attack the new animals, which in that 
case must have come in from the south ? It has 
even been supposed that the Esquimaux may be 
their descendants ; but they are quite different in 
physical characters, and have no nearer resemblance 



92 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

in their arts than other rude peoples. In opposition 
to all this we have not only the remarkable change 
in the races of men and in their animal associates, 
but when we know that the whole geographical fea- 
tures of our continents have changed since the palan- 
thropic age, and that not only are our continents 
reduced in size since the continental post-glacial 
period, but that there is evidence of re-elevation as 
well as subsidence, and this within a short period — 
say eight thousand years less the historic period on 
the one hand and the early palanthropic on the 
other — it seems impossible to doubt the greatness 
and suddenness of the physical break that divides 
the anthropic age into two distinct portions. All 
this may be held to be certainly known as geological 
fact, and it would be folly to overlook it in any 
discussions as to primitive man, or in any com- 
parisons of the evidence afforded by his remains with 
that of early human history or tradition. 

But if man was a witness of and sufferer in 
this great catastrophe, and if any men survived it, 
did they preserve no tradition or memory of such 
a stupendous event .? We may imagine this to be 
possible. The survivors may have belonged to the 
rudest and most isolated of the races of men, and 
may have had no means of knowing the extent of the 
disaster or of preserving its memory. On the other 
hand, they may have attained to a sufficient degree of 
culture to have had some means of perpetuating the 
memory of great events. If so, we may imagine that 



END OF THE PALANTHROPIC AGE 93 

the great diluvial cataclysm which separates the 
human or anthropic period into two parts may have 
left an indelible mark in the history or tradition of 
mankind. We shall inquire into this in the sequel, 
but must first consider what geological monuments 
remain of the early neanthropic age in Europe.^ 

In the meantime I may remark that, if we take 
the Canstadt peoole to represent the ruder tribes of 
the antediluvian Cainites, the feebler folk of Truchere 
to represent the Sethites, and the giant race of Cro- 
magnon and Mentone as the equivalent of the ' mighty 
men ' or Nephelim of Genesis who arose from the 
mixture of the two original stocks, we shall have a 
somewhat exact parallel between the men of the caves 
and gravels and those we have so long been familiar 
with in the Book of Genesis. 

^ A valuable paper by Dawkins ' On the relation of the Palaeo- 
lithic to the Neolithic Period,' reaches me when correcting the proof 
of this volume, (Reprint from Journal of Anthropological Society^ 
February 1894.) 



94 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



CHAPTER VII 

THE EARLY NEANTHROPIC AGE 

There has been much confusion among anthro- 
pologists respecting the distinction of this from the 
preceding age. The Cro-magnon race has been 
classed as neanthropic, and has been confounded 
with a very dissimilar people which succeeded it after 
an interval of some duration. The gap between the 
disappearance of the earlier race and the arrival of 
the newer has thus been overlooked, and no account 
has been taken of the great intervening faunal and 
geographical changes. This has arisen from neglect- 
ing or being unable to appreciate the geological part 
of the evidence ; and the somewhat lamentable result 
has been that it is difficult for the ordinary reader to 
arrive at any certainty, in the midst of conflicting 
statements all based on imperfect data. In these 
circumstances it will be well to begin this chapter with 
some examples of the relations of these different 
races. 

At Grenelle, near Paris, on the river Seine, there is 
a succession of old inundation beds of that river, ex- 



THE EARLY NEANTHROPIC AGE 95 

tending from the oldest part of the anthropic to 
modern times, and furnishing what may be regarded 
as a chronological series for Northern France, as many 
human remains have been from time to time deposited 
on this old eddy of the Seine and buried under 
newer accumulations. Belgrand has shown that in 
the lowest gravels of this deposit the long-headed 
Canstadt man is alone found. Immediately above 
this occur remains of the Cro-magnon type, and these 
are associated with and overlain by beds holding 
large stones or erratic blocks, a monument perhaps of 
the ph3/sical disturbances closing the palanthropic 
age. Above these the next remains are those of a 
race of men of smaller stature and with less elongated 
heads, which we shall find belong to the neanthropic 
age. Here, as Quatrefages points out, we have a 
distinct stratigraphical succession, which accords with 
that in other localities. 

If we now turn to England we may select from 
other examples the Cresswell caves, so carefully ex- 
plored by Dawkins and Mello, and in which we have 
well-ascertained evidence from fossils as well as from 
superposition. Without going into the details as to 
the several chambers and passages in these caverns, 
we find as the result of the whole the following suc- 
cession in ascending order : 

1. White calcareous sand, a deposit from water, 
but with no animal remains. 

2. Stiff ted clay with blocks of limestone, and in 
places underlaid by a ferruginous sand. These beds, 



96 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

of which the red clay is the principal, contain bones 
of rhinoceros leptorhinus, hippopotamus, bison, bear, 
hyena and fox, but no human remains. Dawkins, 
however, shows that in other caves farther south some 
rude flint implements show that man had already 
appeared in England, though he may not have made 
his way as far north as Yorkshire. 

3. Above this lies a stratum of red sandy cave 
earth, in which occur the bones of the mammoth and 
the woolly rhinoceros, the horse, the bison, the bean 
and the hyena, but the leptorhine rhinoceros is gone 
The bones are gnawed by hyenas, and there are rude 
quartzite implements. Over this, and representing 
the later part of the palanthropic age, corresponding 
to some of the French, Belgian, and Lebanon caves, 
are an upper cave earth and breccia, rich in ' palaeo- 
lithic ' flint implements and bones of the animals of 
the mammoth age. 

4. Above this, in the surface soil and disturbed 
portions of the underlying beds, are remains of the 
neanthropic period, including twelve species of 
modern animals, but with no trace of the great 
extinct quadrupeds. Connected with these were 
human skulls of the same type found in the ancient 
burial barrows of England, and belonging to races 
still extant. The Cresswell caves give no bones of 
palseocosmic men, but they very well show the suc- 
cession of the early period of mild climate, the later 
severe climate, the extinction of the old animals 
contemporary with the earliest men, and the final 



THE EARLY NEANTHROPIC AGE 



97 



succession of modern men and animals to the now 
insular Britain, which, in the times represented by the 
beds one, two, and three above mentioned, was a part 
of the mainland of Europe. 




FLINT FLAKES OF TWO TYPES FROM PALANTHROPIC AND 
NEANTHROPIC CAVES IN THE LEBANON 



But perhaps the most interesting views of the 
succession of early men and the gap between the 
palanthropic and neanthropic periods are presented 
by the Belgian caves explored by Schmerling and 
Dupont. The latter has excavated more than sixty 

G 



98 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

caverns, and has carefully noted the mode of occur- 
rence of their contents, collecting at the same time a 
vast number of bones and implements, now admirably 
arranged in the museum of Brussels. In Belgium 
the earlier anthropic period has been characterised 
as that of the mammoth. The beginning of the ne- 
anthropic is still a reindeer age, though that animal 
was apparently becoming rare. It existed, as we know, 
in Central Europe till the time of Caesar. 

The caves of Furfooz, and especially that of 
Frontal, are among the most instructive. Dupont 
has found that in many caves the older remains of 
the mammoth age are contained in or covered by a 
diluv'ial or inundation mud,^ which seems to be the 
closing deposit of this age. Now in the Frontal 
cave this mud remained undisturbed and extended 
out into a platform in front of the cave. The cave 
itself had been used as a place of burial, and as many 
as sixteen skeletons were found in it, with flint 
implements, perforated shells, flat pieces of sandstone 
with sketches of figures scratched on them, and an 
earthen vase. All these lay above the original 
palanthropic mud floor, and belonged to new tribes 
which probably knew nothing of their predecessors, 
whose bones were covered by the inundation mud 
below. On the platform in front of the cave was a 
hearth with the ashes of funeral feasts, and around 
this were found a multitude of bones of animals, 
of the modern species of the country. The people 

' Sometimes with angular stones — argile h blocaiix. 



THE EARLY NEANTHROPIC AGE 



99 



who used this cave as a sepulchre had evidently 
arrived in Belgium after the palaeocosmic men and 




RESTORATION OF THE SEPULCHRAL CAVE OF FRONTAL, BELGIUM 
(after Diipont) 

'"angula^'stoni?anddi;^7)T^^^^^^ I S-^ace of modern accumulafon.of 

the mammoth were not only extinct, but their remains 
were buried in muddy deposits ; though the reindeer 



loo GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

and even the wild horse still existed, and the time 
was long before the dawn of any authentic history in 
that part of the world. These men have somewhat 
shorter heads than the old Cro-magnon race, and 
tney are of smaller stature, and with finer and more 
delicate features. In these respects they resemble 
the men of the dolmens and long barrows of France 
and England, and the existing Auvergnats and 
Basques, and also the Lapps of the far north. Dupont 
observes that their materials for implements and 
ornaments came almost entirely from regions to the 
southward, and hence he infers commerce with tribes 
in that direction and the existence of enemies in the 
north. I should rather infer that the men of Frontal 
had immigrated into Belgium from the south, and 
that they were a small and poor outlying tribe of a 
greater people living south of them. Dupont also 
remarks on their evident care of the dead, a charac- 
teristic of the early ueocosmic men, their belief in a 
future life, and the absence of warlike weapons, whence 
he infers that they were a mild and pacific race — a 
conclusion which makes against the idea entertained 
by some, that they may have displaced the formidable 
palaeocosmic men by conquest. 

Similar illustrations are afforded by the caves and 
rock-shelters of France, Switzerland, and Syria, and 
have convinced many of the ablest archaeologists of 
the existence of a decided break between the palan- 
thropic and neanthropic ages. In such a case also it 
is to be observed that a few decided, positive facts 



THE EARLY NEANTHROPIC AGE loi 

are of more value than any number of examples in 
which, from local circumstances, the succession may 
be obscure or uncertain. 

The above examples relate to the men of the 
older neanthropic age, the men of the so-called 
neolithic or polished stone age of archaeologists. 
These men can be shown to be identical with the 
oldest populations of postdiluvian Europe, peoples 
whose descendants exist to-day in many parts of 
Western Europe, though they have been more or less 
displaced or mixed with later intrusive races. These 
people have gone on without any physical cataclysm, 
or change of fauna, or geographical or climatal 
changes of any magnitude, into the ages of bronze 
and iron and of the modern civilisation. Thus, while 
the palseocosmic men passed away abruptly and have 
left no certain successors, those who succeeded them 
pass on without a break into the existing populations 
of the world. 

We must, however, here guard ourselves from a 
misconception which has apparently unconsciously 
deceived many writers on this subject. It by no 
means follows from the facts insisted on above that 
there are no direct links of connection between palaeo- 
cosmic and neocosmic men. The ancestors of the 
latter must have existed through the palanthropic 
period, and wherever they were living they may have 
had the same characters which distinguish them at 
a later time, and which persist to this day. There 
would therefore be nothing contradictory to our 



J02 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

general view in finding that the small, fine-featured 
men who succeeded the giants of the olden time were 
in some more genial parts of the world extant from 
the first. Nay, it may even appear that they were 
similar to the Truchere race, and that still more primi- 
tive people whose bones are yet unknown, and who 
inhabited Europe in the early rriild period preceding 
the mammoth age. Neither is there anything ano- 
malous in the occasional reappearance of characters 
similar to those e\en of the Canstadt race at the 
present time, not because any modern men are direct 
descendants of this race, but because under certain 
conditions these characters tend to be reproduced. 
Let us put the case conjecturally as follows : 

The original men who peopled the northern 
continents after the first glacial period were of 
small stature, agile, and well formed, with mild 
and pleasing countenance and heads of the medium 
(mesitocephalic) type. They were dwellers in a 
warm climate and subsisted on fruits. As popula- 
tion increased and men became hunters and fisher- 
men, and wandered widely over the world, a large- 
boned, coarse-featured, and savage type of man arose, 
such as we find in the older caves and gravels, and 
weapons of kinds not needed in primitive time«; were 
invented. In this state of affairs, when the coarser 
and stronger races had made themselves masters of 
the world, and had perhaps partially intermixed with 
the older and more peaceful peoples, a great diluvial 
catastrophe occurred, which swept away the greater 



THE EARLY NEANTHROPJC AGE 103 

part of men. The survivors were of the old and 
unmodified stock, and it was they who repeopled 
the new world, finding possibly here and there some 
survivors of the former population, or themselves 
locally relapsing into a similar state. In this case 
all the seeming paradoxes and contradictions which 
have perplexed archaeologists would be easily ex- 
plained. We might even find occasional captives of 
the primitive small race among the interments of the 
old giants, and we might find new races of superior 
physical power arising in the new world and again 
intruding on the feebler race. 

In closing our notice of this period we may pro- 
ceed to connect it with actual history in the British 
Islands. When the Romans invaded Britain they 
found in it two races of men physically very distinct, 
one of them the aborigines, who had made their way 
to the island as its first population after the close of 
the mammoth age, the others apparently a later 
intrusion. They are known to English antiquaries 
from their modes of burial as the men of the long and 
the round barrows or funeral mounds. The first of 
these are beyond doubt the kinsmen of our little 
men of the Trou de Frontal, in Belgium. They are 
thus described by Greenwell and Taylor ^ : 

They were of feeble build, short stature, dark 
complexion, and somewhat long skull. They buried 
their dead in long barrows or mounds with interior 
chambers and passages ; some of these are as much as 

' Greenwell, British Barrows ; Taylor, Oi-gin of the Aryans. 



104 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

400 feet in length, and resemble artificial caves ; and 
there can be no doubt that, as in Belgium, they buried 
their dead in caves when these were accessible ; and 
the laborious construction of the long barrows when 
caves failed is an indication of the great importance 
they attached to the secure and decent sepulture of 
the dead. No trace of metal is found in their 
barrows, and but little pottery, but it is believed that 
they had at a very early time domesticated sheep and 
cattle and practised agriculture. These people are 
now identified with the people of the south and west 
of England, called by the Romans Silures. They 
were the builders of the cromlechs, dolmens, and 
other megalithic structures so common in various 
parts of the old continent. Their type survives to 
this day in the small dark people of parts of Wales 
and the south and west of Ireland, and in parts of the 
Hebrides. Their physical characters connect them 
with the primitive populations of the hills of Central 
France, with the Basques of the Pyrenees, the Corsi- 
cans, the Berbers of Africa, and the Guanches of the 
Canary Islands, and the term Iberian has been applied 
to the whole group. Their language was originally 
not Aryan, but Turanian. They represent not merely 
a new race still surviving, but a distinct advance in 
practical civilisation over that of the peoples of the 
palanthropic age, in Europe at least. 

At the time of the Roman conquest this primitive 
race had been replaced in the east of England and 
south of Scotland by a wholly different people, sup- 



THE EARLY NEANTHROPIC AGE 



[05 



posed to be identical with the Celtae of the Romans. 
They were tall, muscular, with broader and shorter 
heads, fair complexion, and light-coloured hair. They 
buried their dead in round barrows or mounds, and 
seem at a very early period to have possessed bronze, 
and so to have introduced what has been termed 
the bronze age into Britain. At the time of the 
Roman invasion, however, they already possessed 
iron weapons. These people were Aryan in speech, 
allied to the Gauls and Belgae, and the ancestors 
of the so-called Celtic populations of the British 
Islands. 







CROMLECH AT FONTANACCIA, CORSICA (after Dc MortiUet) 



io6 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PALANTHROPIC AGE IN THE LIGHT OF 
HISTORY 

The time was when the earHer books of the He- 
brew Scriptures stood almost alone in their notices 
of the creation and antediluvian times, and when 
critics could quietly take for granted that they were 
altogether mythical. This state of things has now 
passed away from the minds of the better informed, 
and it may be profitable before proceeding farther to 
glance for a moment at some of the recent corrobora- 
tions, if they may be so called, of the Bible history 
from altogether unexpected quarters. 

In the first place, there can now be no doubt that 
the order of creation, as revealed to the author of 
the first chapter of Genesis, corresponds with the 
results of astronomical and geological research in a 
manner which cannot be accidental.^ This old docu- 
ment thus stands in the position of a prophecy which 
has been fulfilled in its details. Besides this, the dis- 

' For evidence of this I may be permitted to refer to my work, 
The Origin of the World. 



EARLY HISTORY 107 

coveiy of the similar though not identical Chaldean 
creation tablets throws a remarkable and Interesting 
side-light on the whole question. The Chaldean 
tablets are unquestionably very ancient, and borrowed 
from still older documents from which they are alleged 
to have been copied. But they and the Genesis 
narrative are independent of each other. Neither can 
have been copied from the other. Thus there must 
have been a still more ancient common source of the 
narrative, and, as I have elsewhere urged,^ the greater 
simplicity and monotheistic character of the Hebrew 
document entitle it to the palm of the higher anti- 
quity. 

With reference to the antediluvian age and the 
Deluge, while the Bible is here only in accord with 
almost universal tradition, and this in reference to an 
event which if it occurred at all must have fixed itself 
in the memory of the survivors, it is in remarkable 
accordance with very ancient Chaldean writings 
commemorative of the same event. Some principal 
points of this accordance are the following. The 
Chaldean account Implies that the anger of the, gods, 
or some of them, against an evil race of men was the 
cause of the catastrophe. It gives it a universal 
character, so far as the sphere of observation extended. 
It represents the survivors as saved in a ship or ark. 
It represents Hasisadra, its Noah, as sending out 
birds to ascertain the subsidence of the waters. In 

' Modern Science in Bible Lands, 



io8 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

all these points and many others the Chaldean 
account agrees with the Biblical in representing ante- 
diluvian men, or some of them, as civilised, possessing 
domestic animals, and competent to construct large 
ships. 

When we leave the Deluge and come to the post- 
diluvian or neanthropic period, similar coincidences 
occur. The foundation of a primitive Cushite or 
y\kkadian kingdom in the Euphratean valley, the 
dispersion of men according to their families and their 
languages, the early kingdoms contemporary with 
Abraham, mentioned in the narrative of his campaign 
to recover the captives taken from the cities of the 
plain, the extremely early use of the arrow-headed 
characters in Asia, of the hieroglyphic writing in 
Egypt, and of a proto- Phoenician or early Hebrew 
alphabet among the Mineans of ancient Arabia, 
tend at once to vindicate the Bible history, and to 
show hovv^ at a very early period this history may have 
been rendered permanent in written documents. On 
all these grounds scientific archaeologists are begin- 
ning to attach more value than formerly to the Hebrew 
annals, and to recognise them as true historical 
accounts of the times to which they relate. 

It may seem rash to make such a statement at a 
time when it is well known that many divines of 
repute avow themselves as believers in the theory that 
the earlier Biblical books are of comparatively late 
composition. But Science will have her way in a 
matter of this kind, whatever literature or criticism 



EARLY HISTORY 109 

may say, and she is beginning strongly to lift her 
voice against the destructive criticism of the Penta- 
teuch. In a recent article, Professor Sayce, one of 
the best-informed experts in these subjects, uses the 
following language : 

' Naturally, the " higher criticism " is disinclined to 
see its assumptions swept away along with the con- 
clusions which are based upon them, and to sit humbly 
at the feet of the newer science. At first, the results 
of Egyptian or Assyrian research were ignored ; then 
they wxre reluctantly admitted, so far as they did not 
clash with the preconceived opinions of the " higher " 
critics. It was urged, unfortunately with too much 
justice, that the decipherers were not, as a rule, trained 
critics, and that in the enthusiasm of research they 
often announced discoveries which proved to be false 
or only partially correct. But it must be remembered, 
on the other side, that this charge applies with equal 
force to all progressive studies, not excluding the 
" higher criticism " itself 

' The time is now come for confronting the con- 
clusions of the " higher criticism,'' so far as it applies 
to the books of the Old Testament, with the ascertained 
results of modern Oriental research. The amount of 
certain knowledge now possessed by the Egyptologist 
and Assyriologist would be surprising to those who 
are not specialists in these branches of study, while 
the discovery of the Tel-el-Amarna tablets has poured 
a flood of light upon the ancient world, which is at 
once startling and revolutionary. As in the case of 



no GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

Greek history, so too in that of IsraeHtish history, the 
period of critical demolition is at an end, and it is 
time for the archaeologist to reconstruct the fallen 
edifice. 

'But the very word "reconstruct" implies that what 
is built again will not be exactly that which existed 
before. It implies that the work of the " higher 
criticism " has not been in vain ; on the contrary, the 
work it has performed has been a very needful and 
important one, and in its own sphere has helped us 
to the discovery of the truth. Egyptian or Assyrian 
research has not corroborated every historical state- 
ment which we find in the Old Testament, any more 
than classical archaeology has corroborated every 
statement which we find in the Greek writers ; what 
it has done has been to show that the extreme 
scepticism of modern criticism is not justified, that the 
materials on which the history of Israel has been based 
may, and probably do, go back to an early date, and 
that much which the " higher " critics have declared to 
be mythical and impossible was really possible and 
true.' 

In point of fact a much stronger position might 
be held in favour of Genesis, and we shall find in 
comparing it with the monuments of the palanthropic 
and early neanthropic ages that its statements vin- 
dicate themselves as derived from original contem- 
porary documents, which were under no obligations 
to the literature or philosophy of those later times, to 
which they have been relegated by some of the critics. 



EARLY HISTORY iii 

Let us inquire a little more in detail into the 
general features of these early historic notices. 

For the purposes of this inquiry we may content 
ourselves with the consideration of the ancient 
Hebrew documents incorporated in the Book of 
Genesis, and the remains which have been preserved 
of the old Chaldean literature. Both of these re- 
present an antediluvian period of long duration.^ 
Both refer the primitive seats of population to the 
Euphratean region of Western Asia, Both terminate 
the antediluvian age with a great diluvial catastrophe. 
These are sufficient points of general agreement to 
make it probable that both originated in one funda- 
mental history, or at least were based on attempts to 
describe the same events. Otherwise there are great 
differences. The Chaldean accounts have a prolix 
iteration, which makes it probable that they were 
prepared for popular and liturgic use, and may not 
fairly represent the original documents in possession 
of the priestly class. They also naturally introduce 
all the personnel of the Chaldean pantheon, and as 
this must have been a thing of gradual growth it 
gives them an air of recency, though we know that 
they are very old. The Hebrew version, on the 
other hand, is monotheistic, and has an aspect of severe 
simplicity in striking contrast to the florid and popu- 
lar Chaldean version. 

* Hommel has proved [Journal of the Society of Biblical Archceo- 
iogy, 1893), what has always been suspected, that the ten patriarchs of 
Berosus are the same with those of the Sethile line in Genesis. 



112 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

We may first notice what history can tell of the 
palanthropic age, supposing this to be the same with 
that historically known as antediluvian. The account 
of creation in the first chapter of Genesis is altogether 
general, and has no local colouring. It evidently 
refers to the whole history of the making of the 
earth. The second chapter, on the other hand, begins 
at verse 4 the special history of man, and opens with 
a picture which is not, as some have rashly supposed, 
a repetition of the previous general account of 
creation, and still less contradictory to it, but a state- 
ment that immediately before the introduction of 
man the earth had been in a desolate and compara- 
tively untenanted state, that state to which we know 
it had been reduced by the glacial cold and sub- 
mergence. 

Thus the two accounts of the creation of man, 
that in which he appears in his chronological position 
in the general development, and that in which he 
takes a first place, as introductory to his special 
history, are not contradictory, but complementary to 
each other ; and the latter refers wholly to man and 
the creatures contemporary with him in the palan- 
thropic age. It is in accordance with this, and no 
doubt intended by the editor to mark this distinc- 
tion, that the name Elohim is used in the general 
narrative, and Jehovah Elohim in the special one. 
The failure of so many critics to notice this distinc- 
tion, wdiich must have been so plain to the primitive 
historian himself, is a marked illustration of the 



EARLY HISTORY 113 

blindness of certain nineteerith-century savants, so 
full of their own special knowledge, yet so careless 
of science and common sense. 

It would even seem that this distinction appeared 
in the Chaldean Genesis as well ; for fragments of 
what has been called a second Chaldean Genesis have 
been found which seem to correspond with the state- 
ments of the second chapter of Genesis. 

The following is an extract from this second 
Chaldean or Akkadian Genesis as translated by 
Pinches : ' 

1 The glorious house, the house of the gods, in a 
glorious place had not been made ; 

2 A plant had not been brought forth, a tree had not 
been created ; 

3 A brick had not been laid, a beam had not been 
shaped ; 

4 A house had not been built, a city had not been 
constructed ; 

5 A city had not been made, a foundation had not 
been made glorious ; 

6 Niffer had not been built, E-kura had not been con- 
structed ; 

7 Erech had not been built, E-ana had not been con- 
structed ; 

8 The Abyss had not been made, E-ridu had not been 
constructed ; 

9 (As for) the glorious house, the house of the gods, 
its seat had not been made — 

10 The whole of the lands were sea. 

• Expository Times, December 1892 

H 



[14 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

This may be supposed to correspond with the Hebrew 
verses following : 

And no plant of the field was yet in the earth. 

And no herb of the field had yet sprung up. 

For Jahveh Elohim had not caused it to rain on the 
earth. 

And there was not a man to till (irrigate) the ground. 

And there went up a vapour from the earth, and watered 
the surface of the ground. 

This is the Hebrew idea of the condition of the 
great Mesopotamian plain after the pleistocene sub- 
mergence, and before the appearance of man. The 
Chaldean version refers to the same region, but is 
more elaborate and artificial, and brings in the his- 
toric cities of a later time. This difference alone 
would induce us to suppose that the Hebrew record 
may be a better guide for our present comparison. 

The Hebrew writer in the first place gives us to 
understand that a period of comparative desolation 
preceded the appearance of man, a great winter of 
destruction preparatory to a returning spring. He 
then proceeds to localise primeval man by placing 
him in Eden, the Idinu of the Chaldean accounts* 
which we also recognise by the geographical indica- 
tions of the Euphrates and Tigris as its rivers, with 
two companion streams which can scarcely be other 
than the Karun and the Kerkhat. Thus the Bible 
and the Chaldean account agree in their locality for 
the advent of man, for Idinu was the ancient name of 
the plain of Babylonia. It has been objected to this 



EARLY HISTORY 115 

locality that much of this region is low and swampy, 
and has only recently become land by the encroach- 
ment of the rivers on the head of the Persian Gulf 
But if our Biblical authority really refers to palan- 
thropic man, we must bear in mind that in the post- 
glacial period the continents were higher than now, 
and the Babylonian plain must have been a dry and 
elevated district, in all probability forest-clad. We 
must also bear in mind that Eden was a region of 
country, and that the ' garden ' or selected spot ' east- 
ward in Eden ' may have been some rich wooded 
island surroynded by the river streams, and producing 
all fruits pleasant to the taste and good for food. In 
any case the modern objections to the site are based 
on entire ignorance of its geological history, and only 
serve to show how much better informed the ancient 
writer was as to antediluvian geography than his 
modern critics.^ 

It is scarcely necessary to say that this Biblical 
environment of primitive man corresponds with the 
requirements of the case. In a genial climate and 
sheltered position, and supplied with abundance of 
food, the first men would have the conditions neces- 
sary for comfortable existence and for multiplying in 
numbers. 

We have also in the description of one of the 
rivers of Eden a hint as to a few of the wants of 
early man beyond mere food and shelter. We are 

' See, for full discussiori of this, Modern Science in Bible Lands, by 
the author, 

H 2 



ii6 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

told that the district traversed by this river produced 
gold, bedolach, and the shoham stone. I have else- 
where shown that this river must be the Karun, 
draining the Luristan mountains, and that the pro- 
ductions indicated must have been ' native gold and 
silver, wampum beads, and jade and similar stones 
suitable for implements.' ^ Thus we have here a 
picture which may well represent the origin and early 
condition of our pala^ocosmic men. But the parallel 
does not end here. 

According to the history, man falls, and is ex- 
pelled from Eden, is clothed with skins, and becomes 
an eater of animal food. Next we find murderous 
violence, and a consequent separation of the primitive 
people into two tribes, one of which migrates to a 
distance from the other and adopts different modes 
of life. Finally, we have a mixture of the two races, 
leading to a powerful and terrible race of half-breeds, 
or metis, who filled the earth with violence.^ 

In one point only have we reason to doubt 
whether this old history fairly represents the palan- 
thropic age. It notes the invention of musical 
instruments, the use of metals, the domestication of 
animals as already existing in the antediluvian 
period. Of these we have little or no archaeological 
evidence. The only musical instrument of this 
period known is a whistle made of one of the bones 
of a deer's foot, and capable of sounding a tetrachord 

' Modern Science in Bible Lands. 
2 Genesis vi. i-6. 




GfMMlTE 9fi Gnjsiss 

&UMTE B? Limestone 

Cretaceous 

AU.VV/AU 

sn 

L 

SCAUB or MILtS. 



MAP SHOWING THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND GEOLOGICAL RELATIONS 
OF THE SITE OF EDEN AS DESCRIBED IN GENESIS 



ii8 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

or four notes, and we have no certain evidence of 
metals or domesticated animals. We must bear in 
mind that there may have been more civilised races 
than those of the Cro-magnon type, and that the 
latter evince an artistic skill which if it had any scope 
for development may have led to great results. The 
native metals must have been known to man from 
the first, though they must have been rare or only 
locally common ; and m.any semi-barbarous nations 
of later times show us that it is only a short step 
from the knowledge of native metals to the art of 
metallurgy, in so far as it consists in treating those 
ores that in weight and metallic lustre most resemble 
the metals themselves. It is also deserving of notice 
that no other hypothesis than that of antediluvian 
civilisation can account for the fact that in the dawn 
of postdiluvian history we find the dwellers by the 
Euphrates and the Nile already practising so many 
of the arts of civilised life. In connection with this 
we may place the early dawn of literature. Without 
insisting on the documents which the Chaldean Noah, 
Hasisadra, is said to have hid at Sippara before the 
Deluge, we have the known fact that in the earliest 
dawn of postdiluvian history the art of writing was 
known in Chaldea and in Egypt. This at once 
testifies to antediluvian culture, and shows that the 
means existed to record important events. 

There is, perhaps, no one of the vagaries now 
current under the much abused name of evolution 
more opposed to facts, whether physical or historical 



EARLY HISTORY 119 

than the notion that, because 3000 years B.C. 
we have evidence of an advanced civilisation 
in Chaldea and in Egypt, this must have been 
preceded by a long and uninterrupted progress 
through many thousands of years from a savage 
state. Two facts alone are sufficient to show the 
folly of such a supposition. First, the intervention 
of that great physical catastrophe which separates 
the palanthropic and neanthropic periods ; and 
secondly, the testimony of history in favour of the 
arts of civilisation originating with great inventors, 
and not by any slow and gradual process of evolution. 
According to all history, sacred and profane, many 
such inventors existed even in the palanthropic and 
early neanthropic ages, and transmitted their arts 
in an advanced state to later times. The Book of 
Genesis testifies to this in its notices of Tubal Cain 
and Jubal ; and the monuments of Chaldea and 
Egypt show that metallurgy, sculpture, and archi- 
tecture were as far advanced at the very dawn of 
history as in any later period. It is true that Genesis 
represents its early inventors as mere men, albeit 
* sons of God,' while they often appear as gods or 
demi-gods in the early history of the heathen nations ; 
but the fact remains that then, as now, the rare 
appearance of God-given inventive genius is the sole 
cause of the greater advances in art and civilisation. 
Spontaneous development may produce socialistic 
trades' unions or Chinese stagnation, but great gifts, 
whether of prophecy, of song, of scientific insight, 



r20 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

or of inventive power, are the inspiration of the 
Almighty. 

We have in the closing part of the Bible story 
of the antediluvian age even an intimation of the 
deterioration of climate and means of subsistence 
towards the end of the period. Lamech, we are told, 
named his son Noah — rest or comfort — in the hope 
that by his means he should be comforted, because of 
the ground which the Lord had cursed. That curse 
provoked by the sons of man he may have recognised 
as fulfilled in the gradual deterioration of the climate 
toward the close of the palanthropic age. There are 
here surely some curious coincidences which might be 
followed farther, did space permit. 

We now come to the close of the whole in the 
Deluge ; and as this has been made in our own time 
the subject of much discussion, and as it contains 
within itself the whole kernel of the subject, it merits 
a separate treatment. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE DELUGE OF NOAH 

To the older men of this generation, who have 
followed the changes of scientific and historical 
opinion, the story of the Deluge, old though it is, 
has passed through a variety of phases like the 
changes of a kaleidoscope, and which may afford an 
instructive illustration of the modifications of belief 
in other, and some of them to us more important, 
matters, whether of history or of religion, which have 
presented themselves in like varied aspects, and may 
be variously viewed in the future. 

As children we listened with awe and wonder to 
the story of the wicked antediluvians, and of their 
terrible fate and the salvation of righteous Noah, and 
received a deep and abiding impression of the 
enormity of moral evil and of the just retribution 
of the Great Ruler of the Universe. A little later, 
though the idea that all the fossil remains im- 
bedded in the rocks are memorials of the Deluge 
had passed away from the minds of the better 



122 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

informed, we read with interest the wonderful reve- 
lations of the bone-caves described by Buckland, 
and felt that the antediluvian age had become a 
scientific reality. But later still all this seemed to 
pass away like a dream. Under the guidance of 
Lyell we learned that even the caves and gravels must 
be of greater age than the historical Deluge, and 
that the remains of men and animals contained in 
them must have belonged to far-off aeons, antedating 
perhaps even the Biblical creation of man, while the 
historical Deluge, if it ever occurred, must have been 
an affair so small and local that it had left no traces 
on the rocks of the earth. At the same time Biblical 
critics were busy with the narrative itself, showing 
that it could be decomposed into different documents, 
that it bore traces of a very recent origin, that it was 
unhistorical, and to be relegated to the same category 
with the fairy-tales of our infancy. Again, however, 
the kaleidoscope turns, and the later researches of 
geology into the physical and human history of the 
more recent deposits of the earth's crust, the dis- 
coveries of ancient Assyrian or Chaldean records of 
the Deluge, and the comparison of these with the 
ancient history of other nations, rehabilitate the old 
story ; and as we study the new facts respecting the 
so-called palaeolithic and neolithic men, the clay 
tablets recovered from the libraries of Nineveh by 
George Smith, the calculations of Frestwich and 
others respecting the recency of the glacial period, 
and the historical gatherings of Lenormant, we find 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 123 

ourselves drifting back to the faith of our childhood, 
or may congratulate ourselves on having adhered to 
it all along, even when the current of opinion tended 
strongly to turn us away. 

In illustration of the present aspects of the 
question I make two extracts, one from Lenormant's 
Beginnings of History^ another from a recent work of 
my own. 

' We are,' say,s Lenormant, ' in a position to affirm 
that the account of the Deluge is a universal tradition 
in all branches of the human family, with the sole 
exception of the black race, and a tradition every- 
where so exact and so concordant cannot possibly be 
referred to an imaginary myth. No religious or cosmo- 
gonic myth possesses this character of universality. 
It must necessarily be the reminiscence of an actual 
and terrible event, which made so powerful an im- 
pression upon the imaginations of the first parents 
of our species that their descendants could never 
forget it. This cataclysm took place near the 
primitive cradle of mankind, and previous to the 
separation of the families from whom the principal 
races were to descend, for it would be altogether 
contrary to probability and to the laws of sound 
criticism to admit that local phenomena exactly 
similar in character could have been reproduced at 
so many different points on the globe as would 
enable one to explain these universal traditions, or 
that these traditions should always have assumed an 
dientical form, combined with circumstances which 



124 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

need not necessarily have suggested themselves to 
the mind in such a connection.' ^ 

On the geological side, the following may be 
accepted as a summary of facts : ^ 

' If the earliest men were those of the river 
gravels and caves, men of the mammoth age or of 
the palaeolithic or palaeocosmic period, we can form 
some definite ideas as to their possible antiquity. 
They colonised the continents immediately after the 
elevation of the land from the great subsidence 
which closed the pleistocene or glacial period, or in 
what has been called the " continental " period of the 
post-glacial age, because the new lands then raised 
out of the sea exceeded in extent those which we 
now have. We have some measures of the date of 
this great continental elevation. Many years ago. 
Sir Charles Lyell used the recession of the Falls of 
Niagara as a chronometer, estimating their cutting 
power as equal to one foot per annum. He calcu- 
lated the beginning of the process, which dates from 
the post-glacial elevation, to be about thirty thousand 
years ago. More recent surveys have shown that the 
rate is three times as great as that estimated by 
Lyell, and also that a considerable part of the gorge 
was merely cleaned out by the river since the pleis- 
tocene age. In this way the age of the Niagara 
gorge becomes reduced to perhaps seven or eight 
thousand years. Other indications of similar bearing 

' Les Grigines de fHistoire. Brown's translation. 

'^ Modern Science in Bible Lands, 1 888, pp. 244, 245, 251, 252. 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 125 

are found both in Europe and America, and lead to 
the behef that it is physically impossible that man 
could have colonised the northern hemisphere at an 
earlier date. These facts render necessary an entire 
revision of the calculations based on the growth of 
stalagmite in caves, and other uncertain data which 
have been held to indicate a greater lapse of time. 

' If we identify the antediluvians of Genesis with 
the oldest men known to geological and archaeo- 
logical science, the parallelism is somewhat marked 
in physical characteristics and habits of life, and also 
in their apparently sudden and tragical disappearance 
from Europe and Western Asia, along with several 
of the large mammalia which were their contem- 
poraries. If the Deluge is to be accepted as his- 
torical, and if a similar great break interrupts the 
geological history of man, separating extinct races 
from those which still survive, why may we not 
correlate the two? If the Deluge was misused in 
the early history of geology, by employing it to 
account for changes which took place long before the 
advent of man, this should not cause us to neglect 
its legitimate uses, with reference to the early human 
period. It is evident that if this correlation be ac- 
cepted as probable, it must modify many views now 
held as to the antiquity of man. In that case the 
modern gravels and silts, spread over the plateaus 
between the river valleys, will be accounted for, not 
by any greater overflow of the existing streams, but by 
the abnormal action of currents of water diluvial in 



126 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

their character. Further, since the historical Deluge 
must have been of very limited duration, the physical 
changes separating the deposits containing the re- 
mains of palaeocosmic men from those of later date 
would in like manner be accounted for, not by the 
slow processes imagined by extreme uniformitarians, 
but by causes of a more abrupt and cataclysmic 
character.' ^ 

We may proceed to inquire as to whether the 
position which we have now reached is likely to be 
permanent, or may represent merely one shifting 
phase of opinion. For this purpose we may formu- 
late these conclusions in a few general statements, 
merely referring to the evidence on which they are 
based, as any complete discussion of this would 
necessarily be impossible within the limits of this 
work. We may first summarise the present position 
of the matter as indicated by historical and scientific 
research, altogether independently of the Bible.^ 

1. The recent discovery of the Chaldean deluge 
tablets has again directed attention to the statements 
of Berosus respecting the Babylonian tradition of a 
great flood, and these statements are found to be 
borne out in the main by the contents of the tablets. 
There is thus a twofold testimony as to the occurrence 
of a deluge in that Babylonian plain which the Old 

' See also Howorth, The Mavivioth and ilie Flood, and papers by 
Professor Prestwich \x\ Journal Geol. Society zxv^ Trans. Royal Society 
and by Andrews, Winchell, and others in America. 

■^ See articles by the author in The Contemporary Reviczu, Decem- 
ber 1889, and in The Magaziiie of Christian Literature, October 1890 



THE DELUGE OE NOAH 127 

Testament history represents as the earliest seat of 
antediluvian man. As Lenormant has well shown, 
the tradition exists in the ancient literature of India, 
Persia, Phoenicia, Phrygia, and Greece, and can be 
recognised in the traditions of Northern and Western 
Europe and of America, while the Egyptians had a^^ 
similar account of the destruction of men, but ap- 
parently not by water, though their idea of a sub- 
merged continent of Atlantis probably had reference 
to the antediluvian world. Thus we find this story 
widely spread over the earth, and possessed by mem- 
bers of all the leading divisions of mankind. This does 
not necessarily prove the universality of the Deluge, 
though every distinct people naturally refers it to its 
own country. It shows, however, the existence of 
some very early common source of the tradition, and 
the variations are not more than were to have been 
expected in the dififei*ent channels of transmission. 

2. Parallel with this historical evidence lies the 
result of geological and archaeological research, 
which has revealed to us the remains and works 
of prehistoric men, racially distinct fiom those of 
modern times, and who inhabited the earth at a 
period when its animal population was to a great 
extent distinct from that at present existing, and 
when its physical condition was also in many 
respects different. Thus in Europe and Asia, and 
to some extent also in America, we have evidence 
that the present races of men were preceded by 
others which have passed away, and this at the same 



128 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

time with many important species of land animals, 
once the contemporaries of man, but now known 
only as fossils. These ancient men are those called 
by geologists later pleistocene, or post-glacial, or the 
men of the cave and gravel deposits, or of the 
age of the mammoth, and who have been designated 
by archaeologists palaeolithic men, or, more properly, 
palaeocosmic men, since the character of their stone 
implements is only one not very important feature 
of their history, and implements of the palaeolithic 
type have been used in all periods, and indeed are 
still used in some places. 

3. The prevalence among geologists of an ex- 
aggerated and unreasonable uniformitarianism, which 
refused to allow sufficient prominence to sudden 
cataclysms arising from the slow accumulation of 
natural forces, and which was a natural reaction 
from the convulsive geology of an earlier period, has 
caused the idea to be generally entertained that the 
age of palaeocosmic men was of vast duration, and 
passed only by slow gradations and a gradual tran- 
sition into the new conditions of the modern period. 
This view long was, and still is, an obstacle to any 
rational correlation of the geological and traditional 
history of man. Recently, however, new views have 
been forced on geologists, and have led many of the 
most sagacious observers and reasoners to see that 
the palanthropic period is much nearer to us than we 
had imagined. The arguments for this I have re- 
ferred to in previous pages, and need not reiterate 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 129 

them here. A few leading points may, however, be 
noted. One of these is the small amount of physical 
or organic change which has occurred since the close 
of the palanthropic period. Another is the more 
rapid rate of erosion and deposition by rivers in 
the modern period than had previously been sup- 
posed. Another is the striking fact that a large 
number of mammals, like the mammoth and woolly 
rhinoceros, seem to have perished simultaneously 
with the palaeocosmic men, and this by some sudden 
catastrophe.' It has also been shown by Pictet and 
Dawkins that all the extant mammals of Europe 
already existed in the post-glacial age, but along 
with many others now altogether or locally extinct. 
Thus there seems to have been the removal over the 
whole northern hemisphere of a number of the 
largest mammals, while a selected number survived 
and no additions were made. Again, while at one 
time it was supposed that the remains of palaeocosmic 
man and his contemporaries were confined to caverns 
and river alluvia, it is now known that they occur 
also on high plateaus and water-sheds, in beds of 
gravel and silt which must have been deposited there 
under conditions of submergence and somewhat 
active current drift, perhaps in some cases aided by 
floating ice.^ Lastly, while, as must naturally be the 
case, in some places the remains of ancient and more 

* Howorth, The Maintnoth and the Flood. 

2 Prestwich on deposits at Ightham, Kent, Journal Geological 
Society, May 1889. 



I30 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

modern men are mixed, or seem to pass into each 
other, in others, as in the Swiss, Belgian and Lebanon 
caves and in the superficial deposits, there is a dis- 
tinct separation, implying an interval accompanied by 
physical change between the time of the earlier 
and later men. 

Such considerations as these, the force of which 
is most strongly felt by those best acquainted with 
the methods of investigation employed by geologists 
and archaeologists, are forcing us to conclude : (i) 
That there are indicated in the latest geological 
formations two distinct human periods, an earlier and 
a later, characterised by differences of faunae and of 
physical conditions, as well as by distinct races of 
men. (2) That these two periods are separated by 
a somewhat rapid physical change of the nature 
of submergence, or by a series of changes locally 
sudden and generally not long-continued. (3) That 
it is not improbable that this greatest of all revolu- 
tions in human affairs may be the same that has so 
impressed itself on the memory of the survivors as to 
form the basis of all the traditions and historical 
accounts of the Deluge. 

This being the state of the case, it becomes 
expedient to review our ideas of the ancient Hebrew 
records, from which our early, and perhaps crude, 
impressions of this event were derived, and to 
ascertain how much of our notions of the Deluge 
of Genesis may be fairly deduced from the record 
itself, and how much may be due to more or less 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 131 

correct interpretations, or to our own fancy. In con- 
nection with this we may also be able to obtain some 
guidance as to the value to be attached to the 
Hebrew document as a veritable and primitive record 
of the great catastrophe. 

The key to the understanding of the early human 
history of Genesis lies in the story of the fall of man, 
and its sequel in the murder of Abel by his brother 
Cain, the beginning of that reign of violence which 
endures even to this day. From this arose the first 
division of the human race into hostile clans or tribes, 
the races of 'Cain and Seth, on which hinges the 
history, characteristics and fate of antediluvian man ; 
and, as we shall see in the sequel, from this arose 
profound differences in religious beliefs, which have 
tinged the theology and superstitions of all subse- 
quent times. Of course, in making this statement I 
refer to the history given in Genesis, without special 
reference to its intrinsic truth or credibility, but 
merely in relation to its interpretation in harmony 
with its own statements. 

It is further evident that this tragic event must 
have occurred in that Tigro-Euphratean region which 
was the Biblical site of Eden,^ and that while the 
Sethite race presumably occupied the original home 
of Adam, and adhered to that form of religion which 
is expressed in the worship of Jahveh, the coming 
Redeemer and the expected ' Seed of the Woman,' the 
other race spread itself more widely, probably attained 

' Modern Science in Bible Lands^ chap. iv. 

I 2 



132 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

to a higher civilisation, in so far as art is concerned, 
in some of its divisions, and sank to a deeper bar- 
barism in others, while it retained the original wor- 
ship of God the Creator (Elohim). Hence the 
Sethite race is designated as the sons of Adam (Beni 
ha Adam), the true and legitimate children of the 
first man, and the Cainites as Beni Elohim, or sons 
of God.^ The mixture of these races produced the 
godless, heaven-defying Nephelim, the Titans of the 
Old Testament, whose wickedness brought on the 
diluvial catastrophe. These half-breeds of the ante- 
diluvian time were in all probability the best deve- 
loped, physically and perhaps mentally, of the men 
of their period ; and but for the Deluge they might 
have become masters of the world. 

This question of different races and religions 
before the Flood is, however, deserving of a little 
farther elucidation. The names Elohim and Jahveh 
are used conjointly throughout the Book of Genesis 
except in its first chapter, and their mode of occur- 
rence cannot be explained merely on the theory of 
two documents pieced together by an editor. It has 
a deeper significance than this, and one which indi- 
cates a radical diversity between Elohists and Jahvists 
even in this early period. In the earliest part of the 
human history, as distinguished from the general 
record of creation, the two names are united in the 

' That this is the true meaning of the expressions in Genesis vi. I 
cannot doubt. See discussion of the subject in the work cited in 
previous note. 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 133 

compound Jahveh-Elohim, but immediately after the 
fall Eve is represented as attributing to, or identifying 
with, Jahveh alone the birth of her eldest son — * I 
have produced a man, the Jahveh,' and which may 
mean that she supposed Cain to be the promised 
manifestation of God as the Redeemer. Accordingly 
Cain and Abel are represented as offering sacrifice to 
Jahveh, and yet it is said in a verse which must be a 
part of the same document, that it was not till the 
time of Enos, a grandson of Adam, that men began 
to invoke the name of Jahveh. It would seem also 
that this invocation of Jahveh was peculiar to the 
Sethites, and that the Cainites were still worshippers 
of Elohim, the God of nature and creation, a fact 
which perhaps has relation to the so-called physical 
religion of some ancient peoples. Hence their title 
of Beni ha Elohim. Thus the division between the 
Cainite and Sethite races early became accentuated 
by a sectarian distinction as well. We may imagine 
that the Cainites, worshipping God as Creator, and 
ignoring that doctrine of a Redeemer which seemed 
confined to the rival race of Seth, were the deists of 
their time, and held a position which might, accord- 
ing to culture and circumstances, degenerate into a 
polytheistic nature-worship, or harden into an absolute 
materialism. On the other hand, the Sethites, recog- 
nised by the author of Genesis as the orthodox de- 
scendants of Adam, and invoking Jahveh, held to the 
promise of a coming Saviour, and to a deliverance from 
the effects of the Fall to be achieved by His means. 



134 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

It is clear that, from the point of view of the 
author of Genesis, the chosen seed of Seth should 
have maintained their separation from a wicked 
world. Their failure to do this involves them in the 
wrath of Jahveh and renders the destruction of man- 
kind necessary, and in this the whole Godhead under 
its combined aspects of Elohim and Jahveh takes 
a part. A similar view has caused the Chaldean 
narrator to invoke the aid of all the gods in his 
pantheon to effect the destruction of man. 

These considerations farther throw light on the 
double character of the Deluge narrative in Genesis, 
which has induced those ingenious scholars who 
occupy themselves with analysis or disintegration 
of the Pentateuch to affirm two narratives, one 
Elohist and one Jahvist.^ Whatever value may 
attach to this hypothesis, it is evident that if the 
history is thus made up of two documents it gains 
in value, since this would imply that the editor had 
at his disposal two chronicles embodying the obser- 
vations of two narrators, possibly of different sects, 
if these differences were perpetuated in the post- 
diluvian world ; and farther, that he is enabled to 
affirm that the catastrophe affected both the great 
races of men. It farther would imply that these 
early documents were used by the writer to produce 
his combined narrative almost without change oi 

^ See, for a very clear statement of these views, Professor Green 
in Hebraica, January 1889, along with Dr. Harper's rhtinii of the 
Pentateuchal criticism in the previous number. 



777^ DELUGE OF NOAH 135 

diction, so that they remain in their original form of 
the alleged testimony of eye-witnesses, a peculiarity 
which attaches also to the Chalde^ln version, as this 
purports to be in the form given by Hasisadra., the 
Chaldean Noah, himself^ 

Let us now inquire into the physical aspects of 
the Deluge, as they are said to have presented them- 
selves to the ancient witness or witnesses to whom 
we owe the Biblical account of the catastrophe, and 
endeavour to ascertain if they have any agreement 
with the conditions of the great post-glacial Deluge 
of geology. Let it be observed here that we are 
dealing not with prehistoric events but with a 
written history, supposed by some to have been 
compiled from two contemporary documents, and 
corroborated by the testimony of the ancient Chal- 
dean tablets copied by the scribes of Assurbanipal, 
apparently from different originals, preserved in very 
ancient Chaldean temples. 

The preparation of an ark or ship, and the 
accommodation therein, not only of Noah and his 
family, but of a certain number of animals, is a 
feature in which most Deluge narratives agree. 
This implies a considerable advance in the arts of 
construction and navigation, but not more than we 

' Tran^ation of G. Smith and others. With reference to the 
preservation of this and the Hebrew narrative in writing, we should 
bear in mind that writing was an art well known in Chaldea and 
Egypt immediately after the Deluge, or at least between 2000 and 
3000 B.C., and that the Chaldean narrator speaks of documents hidden 
by Noah at Sippara before the Deluge. 



136 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

have a right to infer from the perfection of these arts 
in early postdiluvian times, when it can scarcely be 
supposed that the new communities of men had fully 
regained the position of their ancestors before the 
destruction caused by the great Flood. Lenormant, 
however, remarks here : 

'The Biblical narrative bears the stamp of an 
inland nation, ignorant of things appertaining to 
navigation. In Genesis the name of the ark, Tebah, 
signifies " chest," and not " vessel " ; and there is 
nothing said about launching the ark on the water ; 
no mention either of the sea, or of navigation, or any 
pilot. In the Epopee of Uruk, on the other hand, 
everything indicates that it was composed among 
a maritime people ; each circumstance reflects the 
manners and customs of the dwellers on the shores 
of the Persian Gulf Hasisadra goes on board a 
vessel, distinctly alluded to by its appropriate appel- 
lation ; this ship is launched, and makes a trial-trip 
to test it : all its chinks are calked with bitumen, 
and it is placed under the charge of a pilot.' 

This remark, which I find made by other com- 
mentators as well, suggests, it seems to me, somewhat 
different conclusions The Hebrews when settled, 
either in Egypt or in Canaan, were near to the sea- 
coast, and familiar with boats and with the ships of 
the Phoenicians. If, therefore, they persisted in 
calling Noah's ark a * chest,' it must have been from 
unwillingness to change an old history derived from 
their Chaldean or Mesopotamian ancestors, or be- 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 137 

cause they continued to regard the ark as rather a 
great box than a ship properly so called. On the 
other hand, it is likely that the particulars in the 
Chaldean account came from later manipulation of 
the narrative, after commerce and navigation on the 
Euphrates and Persian Gulf had become familiar to 
the Chaldeans. Thus in this as in other respects the 
Hebrew narrative is the more primitive of the two, 
and is consistent with the necessity of Divine instruc- 
tions to Noah, which, if he had been familiar with 
navigation, would not have been necessary.^ 

As in the Chaldean version, the Biblical history 
begins with the specification of the ark. On this 
(Elohist) portion it is only necessary to say that the 
dimensions of the ark are large and well adapted to 
stowage rather than to speed, and that within it was 
strengthened by three decks and by a number of 
bulkheads, or partitions, separating the rooms or 
berths into which it was divided. Without, it was 
protected and rendered tight by coats of resinous or 
asphaltic varnish {copher), and it was built of the 
lightest and most durable kind of wood (gopher 
or cypress). Only two openings are mentioned, a 
hatch or window above, and a port or door in 
the side. There is no mention of any masts, rigging, 
or other means of propulsion or steerage. The 
Chaldean history differs in introducing a steersman, 

' See also the evidence of an inland position of the writers in the 
record of creation in Genesis i., as stated in my work cited in previous 
note. 



138 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

thus implying the means of propulsion as in an 
actual ship. 

Noah is instructed, in addition to his own family, 
to provide for animals, two of every kind ; but these 
very general terms are afterwards limited by the 
words uph, beinaJi, and remesh, which define birds, 
cattle, and small quadrupeds as those specially 
intended. Noah's ark was not a menagerie, but 
rather like a cattle-ship, capable perhaps of accom- 
modating as many animals as one of those steamers 
which now transfer to England the animal produce 
of Western fields and prairies. The animals por- 
trayed on the ancient monuments of Egypt and 
Assyria, however, inform us that, in early post- 
diluvial times, and therefore probably also in the 
time of Noah, a greater variety of animals were 
under the control of man than is the case in any one 
country at present.^ In the passage referring to the 
embarkation, only the cattle and fowls are mentioned, 
but seven pairs are to be taken of the clean species 
which could be used as food.^ The embarkation 
having been completed on the very day when the 
Deluge commenced, we have next the narrative of 
the Flood itself Here it is noteworthy that God 

^ Houghton, Natural History of the Ancients, and Transactions oj 
the Society of Biblical Archceology ; also representations of tame ante- 
lopes, &c., on Egyptian monuments. 

'^ This has been considered a later addition ; but the practice of all 
primitive peoples has sanctioned the distinction of clean and unclean 
beasts, which is merely defined in the Mosaic law, not instituted for 
the first time. 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 139 

(Elohim) makes the arrangements, and Jahveh shuts 
the voyagers in. 

The first note that our witness enters in his ' log ' 
relates to his impressions of the causes of the cata- 
strophe, which was not effected supernaturally, but by 
natural causes. These are the ' breaking up of the 
fountains of the great deep ' and the ' opening of the 
windows of heaven.' These expressions must be 
interpreted in accordance with the use of similar 
terms in the account of creation in Genesis i., the 
more so that this statement is a portion regarded by 
the composite theory as Elohistic. On this principle 
of interpretation, the great deep is that universal 
ocean which prevailed before the elevation of the dry 
land, and the breaking up of its fountains is the 
removal of that restriction placed upon it when its 
waters were gathered together into one place. In 
other words, the meaning is the invasion of the land 
by the ocean. In like manner, the windows of heaven, 
the cloudy reservoirs of tlie atmospheric expanse, or 
possibly waterspouts, or even volcanic eruptions, and 
not necessarily identical with the great rain extend- 
ing for forty days, as stated in the following clause. 
The Chaldean record adds the phenomena of thunder 
and tempest, but omits the great deep ; an indication 
that it is an independent account, and by a less in- 
formed or less intelligent narrator. It is worthy of note 
that our narrator has no idea of any river inundation 
in the case. 

At this stage we are brought into the -presence of 



I40 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

the question : Is the Deluge represented as a miracu- 
lous or a merely natural phenomenon ? Yet, from 
a scientific point of view, this question has not the 
significance usually attributed to it True miracles 
are not, and cannot be, contraventions or violations of 
God's natural laws. They are merely unusual opera- 
tions of natural powers under their proper laws, but 
employed by the Almighty for effecting spiritual 
ends. Thus, naturally, they are under the laws of 
the material world, but, spiritually, they belong to a 
higher sphere. In the present case, according to the 
narrative in Genesis, the Flood was physically as much 
a natural phenomenon as the earthquakes at Ischia, 
or the eruption of Krakatoa. It was a miraculous or 
spiritual intervention only in so far as it was related 
to the destruction of an ungodly race, and as it was 
announced beforehand by a prophet. Had the ap- 
proaching eruption of Krakatoa been intended as a 
judgment on the wicked, and had it been revealed to 
anyone who had taken pains to warn his countrymen 
and then to provide for his own safety, this would 
have given to that eruption as much of a miraculous 
character as the Bible attaches to the Deluge. In the 
New Testament, where we have more definite infor- 
mation as to miracles, they are usually called * powers ' 
and ' signs,' less prominence being given to the mere 
wonder which is implied in the term * miracle.' 
Under the aspect of poivers, they imply that the 
Creator can do many things beyond our power and 
comprehension, just as in a lesser way a civilised 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 141 

man, from his greater knowledge of natural laws and 
command over natural energies, can do much that is 
incomprehensible to a savage ; and in this direction 
science teaches us that, given an omnipotent God, 
the field of miracle is infinite. As signs, on the other 
hand, such displays of power connect themselves with 
the moral and spiritual world, and become teachers of 
higher truths and proofs of Divine interference. The 
true position of miracles as signs is remarkably 
brought out in that argument of Christ, in which He 
says, ' If ye believe not My words, believe Me for the 
works' sake.' It is as if a civilised visitor to some 
barbarous land, who had been describing to an in- 
credulous audience the wonders of his own country, 
were to exhibit to them a watch or a microscope, and 
then to appeal to them that these were things just as 
mysterious and incredible as those of which he had 
been speaking. 

Returning to the Deluge, we may observe that 
such an invasion of the great deep is paralleled by 
many of which geology presents to us the evidence, 
and that our knowledge of nature enables us to con- 
ceive of the possibility of greater miracles of physical 
change than any on record, such as, for instance, the 
explosion of the earth itself into an infinity of particles, 
the final extinction of the solar heat, or the accession 
to this heat of such additional fierceness as to burn 
up the attendant planets. All this might take place 
without any interference with God's laws, but merely 
by correlations and adjustments of them, as much 



142 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

within His power as the turning on or stopping of 
a machine is in the power of a human engineer. 
Further, such acts of Divine power may be related to 
moral and spiritual things, just as easily as any out- 
ward action resulting from our own will may be 
determined by moral considerations. The time is 
past when any rational objection can be made on the 
part of science to the so-called miracles of the Bible. 

To return to the passengers in the ark. This 
must have been built on high ground, or the progress 
of the Deluge must have been slow, for forty days 
elapsed before the waters reached the ship and floated 
it. It is not unlikely that the ark was built on rising 
ground, for here supplies of timber would be nearer. 
It has puzzled some simple antiquarians to find dug- 
out canoes of prehistoric date on the tops of hills ; 
but they did not reflect that the maker of a canoe 
would construct his vessel where the suitable wood 
could be found, since it would be much easier to carry 
the finished canoe to the shore than to drag thither 
the solid log out of which it was to be fashioned. So 
Noah would naturally build his ark where the wood 
he required could be procured most easily. The 
Chaldean narrator seems to have overlooked this 
simple consideration, for he mentions a launching and 
trial-trip of the ship, a sure mark that he is a later 
authority than the writer in Genesis. 

The inmates of the ark now felt that it was moving 
on the waters, a new and dread sensation which must 
have deeply impressed their minds, and they soon 



TFiE DELUGE OF NOAH 143 

became aware that the ark not merely floated, but 
* went/ or made progress in some definite direction. 
Remark the simple yet significant notes — ' The ark 
was lift up from the earth,' and ' the ark went upon 
the face of the waters.' The direction of driftage is 
not stated, but it is a fair inference, from the probable 
place of departure in Chaldea and that of final 
grounding of "the ark, that it was northward or inland, 
which would indicate that the chief supply of water 
was from the Indian Ocean, and that it was flowing 
inward toward the great sunken plain of interior 
Asia, which, however, the ark did not reach, but 
grounded in the hilly region known to the Hebrews as 
Ararat, to the Chaldeans as Nisr. A curious state- 
ment is made here (Elohist) as to the depth of the 
water being fifteen cubits. Even in a flat country so 
small a depth would not cover the rising grounds ; but 
this is obviously not the meaning of the narrator, but 
something much more sensible and practical. It is 
not unlikely that the measure stated was the water- 
draught of the loaded ark, and that as the voyagers 
felt it rise and fall on the waves, they may have 
experienced some anxiety lest it should strike and go 
to pieces. It was no small part of the providential 
arrangement in their case that in the track of the ark 
everything was submerged more than fifteen cubits 
before they reached it. Hence this note, which is at 
the same time one of the criteria of the simple 
veracity of the history. The only other remark in 
this part of the narrative relates to the entire sub- 



144 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

mergence of the whole country within sight, and the 
consequent destruction of animal life ; and here the 
enumeration covers all land animals, and the terms 
used are thus more general than those applied to the 
animals preserved in the ark. The Deluge culminated, 
in so far as our narrator observed, in one hundred 
and fifty days. 

His next experience is of a gale of wind, accom- 
panied or followed by cessation of the rain and of the 
inflow of the oceanic waters.^ The waters then de- 
creased, not regularly, but by an intermittent process, 
' going and returning ' ; but v/hether this was a tidal 
phenomenon or of the nature of earthquake waves we 
have no information. At length the ark grounded, 
apparently on high ground or in thick weather, for 
no land was visible ; but at length, after two months, 
neighbouring hill-tops were seen. 

The incident of sending out birds to test the 
recession of the waters deserves notice, because of its 
apparently trivial nature, because it appears with 
variations in the Chaldean account, and because it 
has been treated in a remarkably unscientific manner 
by some critics. It indicates the uncertainty which 
would arise in the mind of the patriarch because of 
the fluctuating decrease of the waters, and possibly 
also a misty condition of the air preventing a distinct 
view of distant objects. The birds selected for the 
purpose were singularly appropriate. The raven is 

' Genesis viii. 1,2:' And Elohim made a wind to pass over the 
earth, and the waters abated,' &c. 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 145 

by habit a wanderer, and remarkable for power of 
flight and clearness of distant vision. So long, there- 
fore, as it made the ark its headquarters, ' going and 
returning ' ^ from its search for food, it might be 
inferred that no habitable land was accessible. The 
dove, sent out immediately after the raven,^ is of a 
different habit. It could not act as a scavenger of 
the waters an'd go and return, but could leave only if 
it found land covered with vegetation. As a domesti- 
cated bird also, it would naturally come back to be 
taken into the ark. Hence it was sent forth at 
intervals of seven days, returning with an olive leaf 
when it found tree tops above the water, and remain- 
ing away when it found food and shelter. The 
Chaldean account adds a third bird, the swallow — a 
perfectly useless addition, since this bird, if taken into 
the ark at all, would from its habits of life be incapable 
of affording any information. This addition is a 
mark of interpolation in the Chaldean version, and 
proceeded perhaps from the sacred character attached 
by popular superstition to the swallow, or from the 
familiar habits of the bird suggesting to some later 
editor its appropriateness. Singularly enough, the 
usually judicious Schrader, probably from deficient 
knowledge of the habits of birds, fails to appreciate 
all this, and after a long discussion prefers the 

* Margin of Authorised Version; less fully, 'to and fro ' in the 
text. 

2 There is no reason to suppose, as some have done, a hiatus here 
in the narrative. 

K 



146 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

Babylonian legend for reasons of a most unscientific 
character, actually condemning the perfectly natural 
and clear Biblical story as artificial and due to a recent 
emendation. He says : ' When the story passed over 
to the Hebrews, the name of the swallow has dis- 
appeared,' and *it is only from the Babylonian 
narrative that the selection of the different birds 
becomes clear.' This little disquisition of Schrader 
is, indeed, one of the most amusing instances of that 
inversion of sound criticism which results when un- 
scientific commentators tamper with the plain state- 
ments of truthful and" observant witnesses. 

The uncertainty indicated by the mission of the 
birds seems to have continued from the first day of 
the tenth to the first day of the first month, when 
Noah at length ventured to remove the covering of 
the ark and inspect the condition of the surrounding 
country, now abandoned by the waters, but not 
thoroughly dried for some time longer. Still, so timid 
was the patriarch that he did not dare without a 
special command to leave his place of safety. I am 
aware that if the two alleged documents are arbitrarily 
separated it is possible to see here some apparent 
contradiction in dates ; but this is not necessary if 
we leave them in their original relation.' 

It will be observed that a narrative such as that 

summarised above bears unmistakably stamped upon 

it the characteristics of the testimony of an eye-witness. 

By whomsoever reduced to writing and finally edited, 

' See Green, Hebraica. I.e. 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 147 

it must, if genuine, have come down nearly in its 
present form from the time of the catastrophe which 
it relates. It follows that the narrator leaves no place 
for the current questions as to the universality of the 
Deluge. It was universal so far as his experience 
extended, but that is all. He is not responsible for 
what occurred beyond the limits of his observation 
and beyond the fact that man, so far as known to 
him, perished. If, therefore, as some have held,^ 
Balaam in his prophecy refers to Cainite populations 
as extant in his time, or if Moses declines to trace 
to any of the postdiluvian patriarchs the Rephaim, 
Emim, Zuzim and other prehistoric peoples of Pales- 
tine, we may infer, without any contradiction of our 
narrative, that there were surviving antediluvians 
other than the Noachidae, whatever improbability 
may attach to this on other grounds, and more 
especially from the now ascertained extension of 
the post-glacial submergence over nearly all parts of 
the northern hemisphere. 

Let it also be noticed that beyond the prophetic 
intimation to Noah, and the one expression, Jahveh 
' shut him in,' which may refer merely to providential 
care, there is, as already remarked, nothing miraculous, 
in the popular sense of that term ; and that mythical 
elements, such as those introduced into the Babylonian 
narrative, are altogether absent. The story relates to 
plain matters of fact, which, if they happened at all, 
any one might observe, and for the proof of which 

^ Motais, Deluge Bihlique. 

K 2 



148 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

any ordinary testimony would be sufficient. It may 
be profitable, however, to revert here to the probable 
relation of this narrative to the geological facts 
already adverted to, and also its bearing on the 
mythical and polytheistic additions which we find 
in the Deluge stories of heathen nations. 

Regarding the Biblical Deluge as a record of a 
submergence of a vast region of Eur-Asia and 
Northern Africa, at least, while no similar cata- 
strophe has been recorded subsequently, it is un- 
questionable that submergences equally important 
have occurred again and again in the geological 
history of our continents, and have been equally 
destructive of animal life. It is true that most of 
these are believed to have been of more slow and 
gradual character than that recorded in Genesis, but 
in the case of many of them this is a very uncertain 
inference from the analogy of modern changes ; and 
it is certain that the post-glacial submergence, which 
closed the era of palaeocosmic man and his com- 
panion animals, must have been one of the most 
transient on record. On the other hand, we need 
not limit the entire duration of the Noachic sub- 
mergence to the single year whose record has been 
preserved to us. Local subsidence may have been 
in progress throughout the later antediluvian age, 
and the experience of the narrator in Genesis may 
have related only to its culmination in the central 
district of human residence. Finally, if man was 
really a witness of this last great continental sub- 



THE DELUGE OF NOAH 149 

mergence, we cannot be too thankful that there were 
so intelligent witnesses to preserve the record of the 
event for our information. 

It is needless, then, to enter into further details, 
though these are sufficient to fill volumes if desired, 
in proof of the remarkable convergence of history and 
geological discovery on the great Flood, which now 
constitutes one of the most remarkable illustrations 
of the points of contact of science proceeding on its 
own methods of investigation and Divine revelation, 
preserving the records of ancient events otherwise 
ost or buried under accretions of myth and fancy. 
I have already endeavoured to show that the earliest 
race of palafocosmic men, that of Canstadt, very fairly 
corresponds with what may have been the character 
istics of the ruder tribes of Cainites, and that if we 
regard the Truchere skull as representing the Sethite 
people, we may suppose the Cro-magnon race to re- 
present the giants, or Nephelim,who sprung from the 
union of the two pure types, I have also referred to 
the possibility that the Truchere race, so little known 
to us as yet, may have been a prot- Iberian people, 
possessing even before the Flood domestic animals, 
agriculture, and some of the arts of life, corresponding 
to what we find in the earliest postdiluvian nations. 
This is, indeed, implied in the fact that the postdilu- 
vian nations present themselves to us at once with a 
somewhat advanced condition of the arts, especially 
in Chaldea and in Egypt. Such possibilities may serve 
to suggest to speculative archaeologists that they 



ISO GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

cannot safely assume that all antediluvian or palaeo- 
lithic tribes were barbarous or semi-brutal, or that 
there was a continuous development of humanity with- 
out any diluvial catastrophe. It is also somewhat 
rash to carry back the chronology of Egyptians and 
Babylonians to times when, as we know on physical 
evidence, the Valley of the Nile was an arm of the 
sea, and the plain of the Euphrates an extension 
of the Persian Gulf It is fortunate for the Bible 
that such assumptions are not required by its 
history. 



CHAPTER X 

SPECIAL QUESTIONS RESPECTING THE DELUGE 

In studying the literature relating to the Deluge, we 
are constantly met by questions as to its so-called 
'universality.' Was it a local or universal Deluge 
and if universal in what sense so ? This is a point 
in which neglect or ignorance of the necessary 
physical conditions has led to the strangest miscon- 
ceptions. 

It is obvious that there are four senses in which a 
catastrophe like the Deluge of Noah may be affirmed 
or denied to have been universal. 

I. It may have been universal in the sense of 
being a deep stratum of water covering the whole 
globe, both land and sea. Such universality could 
not have been in the mind of the writer, and probably 
has been claimed knowingly by no writer in modern 
times. Halley in the last century understood the 
conditions of such universality, though he seems to 
have supposed that the impact of a comet might 
supply the necessary water. Owen has directed 
attention to the fact that such a deluge might be as 



152 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

fatal to the inhabitants of the waters as to those of 
the land. In any case, such universality would 
demand an enormous supply of water from some 
extra-terrestrial source. 

2. The Deluge may have been universal in the 
sense of being a submersion of the whole of the land, 
either by subsidence or by elevation of the ocean 
bed. Such a state of things may have existed in 
primitive geological ages before our continents were 
elevated, but we have no scientific evidence of its 
recurrence at any later time, though large portions of 
the continents have been again and again submerged. 
The writers of Genesis i. and of Psalm civ. seem to 
have known of no such total submergence since 
the elevation of the first dry land, and nothing of 
this kind is expressed or certainly implied in the 
Deluge story. 

3. The Deluge may have been universal in so 
far as man, its chief object, and certain animals useful 
or necessary to him, are concerned. This kind of 
universality would seem to have been before the 
mind of the writer when he says that ' Noah only, 
and they who were with him in the ark, remained 
alive.' ^ 

4. The Deluge may have been universal in so far 
as the area and observation and information of the 
narrator extended. The story is evidently told in 
the form of a narrative derived from eye-witnesses, 
and this form seems even to have been chosen or 

' Genesis vii, 23. 



QUESTIONS RESPECTING THE DELUGE 153 

retained purposely to avoid any question of uni- 
versality of the first and second kinds referred to 
above. The same form of narrative is preserved in 
the Chaldean legend. This fact is not affected by 
the doctrine held by some of the schools of disin- 
tegrators, that the narrative is divisible into two 
documents, respectively '• Jahvistic ' and ' Elohistic' 
I have elsewhere ' shown that there is a very different 
reason for the use of these two names of God. But 
if there were two original witnesses whose statements 
were put together by an editor, this surely does not 
invalidate their testimony or deprive them of the 
right to have it understood as they intended. 

It is thus evident that the whole question of 
* universality ' is little more than a mere useless logo- 
machy, having no direct relation to the facts or to the 
credibility of the narrative. 

There are also in connection with this question of 
universality certain scientific and historical facts 
already referred to which we may again summarise 
here, and which are essential to the understanding of 
the question. Nothing is more certainly known in 
geology than that at the close of the later tertiary 
or pleistocene age the continents of the northern 
hemisphere stood higher and spread their borders 
more widely than at present. In this period also 
they were tenanted by a very grand and varied 
mammalian fauna, and it is in this continental age of 
the later pleistocene or early modern time that we 

' Modern Science in Bible Lands, chap. iv. 



154 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

find the first unequivocal evidence of man as existing 
on various parts of the continents. At the close of 
this period occurred changes, whether sudden or 
gradual we do not know, though they could not have 
occupied a very long time, which led to the extinc- 
tion of the earliest races of men and many con- 
temporaneous animals. That these changes were in 
part, at least, of the nature of submergence we learn 
from the fact that our present continents are more 
sunken or less elevated out of the water, and also 
from the deposit of superficial gravels and other 
detritus more recent than the pleistocene over their 
surfaces. We are thus shut up by geological facts to 
the belief in a Deluge geologically modern and prac- 
tically universal. 

One other objection to the Deluge narrative 
perhaps deserves a word of comment — that urged 
against the statement of the gradual disappearance 
of the waters. The extraordinary difficulty is raised 
respecting this, that the water must have rushed sea- 
ward in a furious torrent. The objection is based 
apparently on the idea that the foundation for the 
original narrative was a river inundation in the 
Mesopotamian plain. This cannot be admitted ; but 
if it were, the objection would not apply. River 
inundations, whether of the Nile or Euphrates, sub- 
side inch by inch, not after the manner of mountain 
torrents. Thus this objection is another instance of 
difficulties gratuitously imported into the history. 

In point of fact the narrator represents the 



QUESTIONS RESPECTING THE DELUGE 155 

Deluge as prevailing for a whole year, which would 
be impossible in the case of a river inundation. He 
attributes it in part, at least, to the ' great deep ' — 
that is, the ocean ; and he represents the ark as 
drifting inland or toward the north. Such conditions 
can be satisfied only by the supposition of a sub- 
sidence of the land similar in kind, at least, to the 
great post-glacial flood of geology. Partial subsidences 
of this kind, local but very extreme, have occurred 
even in later times, as, for instance, in the Runn of 
Cutch, the delta of the Mississippi, and the delta of 
the Nile ; and if the objectors are determined to 
make the Deluge of Noah very local and more recent 
than the post-glacial flood, it would be more rational 
to refer to subsidences like those just mentioned, and 
of which they will find examples in Lyell's Prin- 
ciples and other geological books. It is, however, 
decidedly more probable that Noah's flood is identical 
with that which destroyed the men of the mammoth 
age, the palseocosmic or ' palaeolithic ' men ; ^ and in 
that case the recession of the waters would probably 
be gradual, but intermittent, ' going and returning,' 
as our ancient narrator has it ; but there need not 
have been any violent debacle. 

It is also to be noted that a submergence of the 
land and consequent deluge may be cataclysmic or 
tranquil, according to local circumstances, and that it 
may have been locally sudden, while for the whole 
world it was gradual and of longer duration. Such 

' Modern Science in Bible Lands^ chaps, iii. and iv. 



156 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

differences must belong to all great submergences, 
which may in one place produce great disturbance 
and very coarse deposits, in another may be quiet 
and deposit the finest silt. Even the flood of a river 
or the action of a tide admits of variations of this 
kind. In narrow channels the great tides of the 
Bay of Fundy rush as torrents ; in wide bays they 
creep in imperceptibly. 

The traditions and Biblical history of the Deluge 
not only furnish important material for connecting 
the geological ages with the period of human history, 
and for enabling us to realise the fact that early man 
was a witness of some of the later physical and vital 
vicissitudes that have passed over the earth, but may 
be correlated with other ancient traditions which 
seem at first sight to have no immediate relation 
to it. 

As an example, I may refer to the well-known 
Egyptian fable of Atlantis, which may be a remi- 
niscence of early man in the second continental 
period, and which we may, perhaps, even connect 
with the Mexican tradition of civilisation reaching 
America from the East.^ 

Plato has handed down to us a circumstantial 
tradition, derived from Egypt, of a great Atlantic 
continent west of Europe, once thickly peopled, and 
the seat of an empire that was dominant over the 
Mediterranean regions. This continent, or island, 

' It is, perhaps, only an accident that Atl is the Mexican word 
for water. 



QUESTIONS RESPECTING THE DELUGE 157 

was called Atlantis, and it had been submerged with 
all its people in prehistoric times. This tradition 
may have reference to certain geological facts of the 
early modern period already referred to. If the 
Egyptian tradition really extended back to the ante- 
diluvian period, we can readily understand their 
belief in the continent of Atlantis. We have already 
ascertained the great extension in that period of the 
land of Western Europe, and there may have been 
outlying insular tracts in the Atlantic now quite 
unknown to us. These lands may well have sustained 
nations of the gigantic Cro-magnon race, ' men of 
renown,' who, when their westward progress was 
stayed by the ocean, and they were checked in the 
north by the increasing cold, may have turned their 
arms against the dwellers on the Mediterranean 
coasts, perhaps in the age immediately preceding 
the Deluge. We know little as yet of the history of 
those Honshesu, or children of Horus, who are said 
to have preceded the historic period in Egypt. 
There must have been Egyptian literature about 
these people, and should this be recovered we shall 
probably learn more of Atlantis. In the meantime 
we may, at least, bring the tradition of that perished 
continent into harmony with geology and history. 
I may add that we need not consider the above view 
as at variance with that of those archaeologists who, 
like the late Sir D. Wilson,^ suppose the tradition of 
Atlantis to have been founded on vague intimations 

' The Lost Atlantis, 1892. 



158 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

of the existence of America, since any such intima- 
tions which reached the civiHsed nations of Southern 
Europe or Africa would naturally be considered as 
an indication that some part of the lost Atlantis still 
continued to exist. 

In still another direction does the deluge story 
connect itself with physical probabilities. If we 
examine the Atlantic map representing the soundings 
of the Challenger expedition, we shall find evidence 
not only of that extension of land in temperate 
Western Europe which may have originated the 
story of Atlantis, but other dispositions of land, 
especially in the extreme north and south, which 
m.ay have influenced antediluvian climate. We have 
reason to believe that in the second continental 
period, that of palaeocosmic man, Baffin's Bay may 
have been greatly narrowed and Behring's Straits 
entirely closed, while large tracts of land existed 
around Iceland and west of Norway. There would 
thus be almost continuous land connection around 
the north pole, permitting easy extension of man 
and of hardy animals. There would also be much 
less access of ice to the North Atlantic. 

At the same time in another region there was 
probably a land connection from Florida to South 
America by the Bahamas, and the equatorial current 
may have been more powerfully deflected northward 
than now. The effect would be to produce around 
the North Atlantic, and especially on the eastern 
side, a golden age of genial climate, fitted to early 



QUESTIONS RESPECTING THE DELUGE 159 

man, but destined as time went on and geographical 
changes proceeded, preparatory to the great diluvial 
subsidence, to fade away into the cool and damp 
climate of the later post-glacial or antediluvian 
period. This again would lead to migrations, wars, 
and fierce struggles for existence among the human 
populations — a time of anarchy and violence pre- 
ceding the final catastrophe. 

Much collateral evidence in substantiation of these 
probabilities can be collected from the distribution of 
marine life ^ and the changes of level, even on the 
xvmerican coast. They conjure up before us strange 
visions of the prehistoric past, and of the vicissitudes 
of which man himself has been witness, and of 
which, whether through memory and tradition or the 
revelation of God, he has continued to retain some 
written records which, long dim and uncertain, are 
now beginning to be put into relation with physical 
facts ascertained by modern scientific observation. 

We have already seen how the Deluge story and 
the fate of the antediluvians have interwoven them- 
selves with the myths and superstitions of the Old 
World. The six great gods of the Egyptian pantheon 
represent the creative days, and the ' Sons of Horus ' 
the antediluvians. So we have the ten patriarchs or 
kings of the old Chaldeans corresponding to those of 
Genesis, and the heaven-defying Titans of the old 
mythologies representing the giants before the Flood. 
Perhaps, however, no illustration of this is more 

' See The Ice Age in Canada, by the author. Montreal : 1893. 



i6c GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

patent or more touching than that well-known one 
of Ishtar, the Astarte of the Syrians, the Artemis of 
the Greeks, and who has been identified with the 
chief female divinity of many other ancient nations* 
even with that Diana whom ' all Asia and the 
inhabited world worshippeth.' 

The Chaldean deluge tablets for the first time 
introduce her to us as an antediluvian goddess, and 
inform us that she is the deified mother of men, the 
same with the Biblical Isha, or Eve. In the crisis of 
the Deluge we are told, ' Ishtar spoke like a little 
child, the great goddess pronounced her discourse. 
Behold how mankind has returned to clay. I am 
the mother who brougJit foj^th men, and like the fi.shes 
they fill the sea. The gods because of the angels of 
the abyss are weeping with me.' Ishtar is thus the 
mother of men, herself deified and gone into the 
heavens, but even there mourning over her hapless 
children. She may be a star-goddess, or the moon 
may be her emblem ; but for all that she appears in 
this old legend as a deified human mother,, with a 
mother's heart yearning over the progeny that had 
sprung from her womb, and had been nourished in 
her breast. It was this, more than her crescent or 
starry diadem, that commended her worship to her 
children. Her representative in Genesis, the first 
mother, Isha, or Eve, is no goddess, but a woman. 
Yet is she the emblem of life and the mother of a 
promised Redeemer of humanity, who is to undo the 
results of sin and ^to restore the Paradise of God 



QUESTIONS RESPECTING THE DELUGE i6i 

bruising the head of the great serpent who, in the 
Chaldean as in the Hebrew story, represents the 
power of evil. Ishtar has been represented as the 
bride of the god Tammuz, the Adonis ^ of the Greeks, 
and whose worship was one of the idolatries that led 
the women of Israel astray, ' weeping for Tammuz ' ; ^ 
but it now appears that, according to the oldest 
doctrine, she is his mother,^ and he was a ' keeper 
of sheep,' dwelling in Eden, or Idinu, and murdered 
by his brother Adar, who is also a god, and more 
especially the god of war. In short, the story of 
Ishtar, Tammuz, and Adar, the parent of so many 
myths, is merely the familiar one of Cain and Abel. 
Hence the belief that the murder of Tammuz was 
connected with the Deluge, and hence the annual 
lamentation of the women for Tammuz when the 
spring inundations swelled and reddened the waters 
of the streams — a rite possibly even antediluvian, 
and commemorative of the mourning of the first" 
mother for her slain son, to rescue whom it was 
fabled that she even descended into Hades. 

Oppert regards the legend of Tammuz and Ishtar 
as a solar myth, and supposes that the story of Cain 
and Abel was based on it. But a fam.ily history of 
crime and sorrow is a much more real and probable 
thing as a basis for tradition than a solar myth, and 
naturalists at least will be disposed to invert the 
theory, and to believe that the simple Bible story was 

* From the Semitic title ' Adonai,' my Lord. 
"^ Ezekiel viii. 14. ^ Sayce, Hibhert Lectures, 

L 



1 62 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

the foundation of all the varied cults and superstitions 
that clustered round Ishtar and Tammuz, as well as 
personages like Osiris and Isis, who seem to have 
been later avatars, or revivals of the same tale. 

It would be easy to show that the deluge story has 
intimate connections with other ancient myths and 
superstitions, as well as with the results of modern 
archaeology and geology. But were this all, our 
inquiry, however interesting and curious, would have 
little practical value. It has two important bearings 
on the present time. Christianity bases itself, its 
founder Himself being witness, on the early chapters 
of Genesis, as history and prophecy, and the treat- 
ment which these ancient and inspired records have 
met with in modern times at the hands of destruc- 
tive criticism is doing its worst in aid of the anti- 
Christian tendencies of our time. To remove the 
doubts that have been cast on these old records is 
therefore a clear gain to the highest interests of 
humanity, and if theology and philology are unable 
to secure this benefit, natural science may well step 
forward to lend its aid. Another connection with 
present interests depends on the fact that, while 
superstitions akin to that which deified the mother of 
the promised seed, and introduced the world-wide 
cults of Astarte and Aphrodite, still reign over great 
masses of men, absolute materialism and desperate 
struggle for existence among men and nations are 
growing and extending themselves as never before 
since the antediluvian times, and are provoking a 



. QUESTIONS RESPECTING THE DELUGE 163 

like signal and direful vengeance. In the midst of 
all this, Christians look forward to the second coming 
of Jesus Christ to destroy the powers of evil and to 
inaugurate a better time ; and it was He who said, 
' As it came to pass in the days of Noah, even so 
shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.' Let us / 
remember the old story of the flood of Noah lest those > 
days come on us unawares. 



L 2 



i64 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



CHAPTER XI 

THE PREHISTORIC AND HISTORIC IN THE EAST 

The term prehistoric was first used by my friend Sir 
Daniel Wilson in his Prehistoric Annals of Scotland. 
It was intended to express ' the whole period dis- 
closed to us by archaeological evidence as distin- 
guished from what is known by written records.' As 
Wilson himself reminds us, the term has no definite 
chronological significance, since historic records, pro- 
perly so-called, extend back in different places to 
very different times. With reference, for example, 
to the Chaldean and Hebrew peoples, if we take 
their written records as history, this extends back 
to the Deluge at least. Written history in Egypt 
reaches to at least 3000 years B.C., while in Britain 
it extends no farther than to the landing of Julius 
Caesar, and in America to the first voyage of Colum- 
bus. In Palestine we possess written records back 
to the time of Abraham, but these relate mainly to 
the Hebrew people. Of the populations which pre- 
ceded the Abrahamic immigration, those ' Canaanites 
who were already in the land,' we have little history 



THE PREHISTORIC EAST 165 

before the Exodus, except the remarkable letters 
recently unearthed at Tel-el-Amarna, in Egypt. In 
Egypt we have very early records of the dwellers on 
the Nile, but of the Arabian and African peoples, 
whom they called Pun and Kesh, and the Asiatic 
peoples, whom they knew as Cheta and Hyksos, we 
have till lately known little more than their names 
and the representations of them on Egyptian monu- 
ments. In both countries there may be unsounded 
depths of unwritten history before the first Egyptian 
dynasty, and before the Abrahamic clan crossed the 
Jordan. 

What, then, in Egypt and Palestine may be re- 
garded as prehistoric.'* I would answer — (i) The 
geographical and other conditions of these countries 
immediately before the advent of man. (2) The 
evidence which they afford of the existence, habits, 
and history of man in periods altogether antecedent 
to any written history, except such notes as we have 
in the Bible and elsewhere as to the so-called ante- 
diluvian world. (3) The facts gleaned by archaeo- 
logical evidence as to tribes known to us by no 
records of their own, but only by occasional notices 
in the history or monuments of other peoples. In 
Egypt and Palestine such peoples as the Hyksos, the 
Anakim, the Amalekites, the Hittites, and Amorites 
are of this kind, though contemporary with historic 
peoples. 

Prehistoric annals may thus, in these countries, 
embrace a wide scope, and may introduce us to un- 



i66 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

expected facts and questions respecting primitive 
humanity. I propose in the present chapter to direct 
attention to some points which may be regarded 
as definitely ascertained in so far as archaeological 
evidence can give any certainty, though I cannot 
pretend, in so limited a space, to enter into details as 
to their evidence. 

Before proceeding, I may refer by way of illustra- 
tion to another instance brought into very promi- 
nent relief by the publication of Schuchardt's work 
on Schliemann's excavations. We all know how 
shadowy and unreal to our youthful minds were the 
Homeric stories of the heroic age of Greece, and our 
faith and certainty were not increased when we read 
in the works of learned German critics that the 
Homeric poems were composite productions of an 
age much later than that to which they were sup- 
posed to belong, and that their events were rather 
myths than history. How completely has all this 
been changed by the discoveries of Schliemann and 
his followers ! Now we can stand on the very 
threshold over which Priam and Hector walked. 
We can see the jewels that may have adorned Helen 
or Andromache. We can see double-handled cups 
like that of old Nestor, and can recognise the inlaid 
work of the shield of Achilles, and can walk in the 
halls of Agamemnon. Thus the old Homeric heroes 
become real men, as those of our time, and we can 
understand their political and commercial relations 
with other old peoples before quite as shadowy. 



THE PREHISTORIC EAST 167 

Recent discoveries in Egypt take us still farther 
back. We now find that the ' Hanebu,' who invaded 
Egypt in the days of the Hebrew patriarchs, were 
prehistoric Greeks, already civilised, and probably 
possessing letters ages before the date of the Trojan 
War. So it is with the Bible history, when we see 
the contemporary pictures of the Egyptian slaves 
toiling at their bricks, or when we stand in the 
presence of the mummy of Ramescs II. and know 
that we look on the face of the Pharaoh who en- 
slaved the Hebrews, and from whose presence Moses 
fled. 

Such discoveries give reality to history, and 
similar discoveries are daily carrying us back to old 
events, and to nations of whom there was no history 
whatever, and are making them like our daily friends 
and companions. A notable case is that of the 
children of Heth, known to us only incidentally by 
a few members of the nation who came in contact 
with the early Hebrews. Suddenly we found that 
these people were the great and formidable Kheta, 
or Khatti, who contended on equal terms with the 
Egyptians and Assyrians for the empire of Western 
Asia ; and when we began to look for their remains, 
there appeared, one after another, stone monuments, 
seals, and engraved objects, recording their form and 
their greatness, till the tables have quite been turned, 
and there is danger that we may attach too much im- 
portance to their agency in times of which we have 
scarcely any written history. Thus, just as the 



i68 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

quarry and the mine reveal to us the fossil remains 
of animals and plants great in their time, but long 
since passed away, so do the spade and pick of the 
excavator constantly turn up for us the bones and 
the works of a fossil and prehistoric humanity. 

Egypt may be said to have no prehistoric periods 
and our task with it will be limited to showing that 
its written history scarcely goes back as far as many 
Egyptologists suppose and confidently affirm, and 
that beyond this it has as yet afforded nothing. 
Egypt, in short, old though it seems, is really, a new 
country. When its priests, according to Plato, taunted 
Solon with the newness of the Greeks and referred to 
the old western empire of Atlantis, they were probably 
trading on traditions of antediluvian times, which had 
no more relation to the actual history of the Egyptian 
people than to that of the Greeks. 

The limestones and sandstones which bound the 
Nile valley, sometimes rising in precipitous cliffs 
from the bank of the stream, sometimes receding for 
many miles beyond the edge of the green alluvial 
plain, are rocks formed in cretaceous and early tertiary 
times under the sea, when all Northern Africa and 
Western Asia were beneath the ocean. When raised 
from the sea-bed to form land, they were variously 
bent and fractured, and the Nile valley occupies a 
rift or fault, which, lying between the hard ridges of 
the Arabian hills on the east and the more gentle 
elevations of the Nubian desert on the west, afforded 
an outlet for the waters of interior Africa and for the 



THE PREHISTORIC EAST 169 

great floods which in the rainy season pour down from 
the mountains of Abyssinia. 

This outlet has been available and has been in 
process of erosion by running water from a period 
long anterior to the advent of man, and with this 
early prehuman history belonging to the miocene 
and pliocene periods of geology we have no need to 
meddle, except to state that it was closed by a great 
subsidence, that of the pleistocene or glacial period, 
when the land of North Africa and Western Asia 
was depressed several hundred feet, when Africa was 
separated from Asia, when the Nile valley was an 
arm of the sea, and when sea-shells were deposited on 
the rising grounds of Lower Egypt at a height of two 
hundred feet or more.^ Such raised beaches are found 
not only in the Nile valley but on the shores of the 
Red Sea, and, as we shall see, along the coast of 
Palestine ; but, so far as known, no remains of man 
have been found in connection with them. This 
great depression must, however, geologically speaking, 
have been not much earlier than the advent of man, 
since in many parts of the world we find human re- 
mains in deposits of the next succeeding era. 

This next period, that known to geologists as the 
post-glacial or early modern, was characterised by 
an entire change of physical conditions. The con- 
tinents of the northern hemisphere were higher and 

' Hull, Geology of Palestine and adjacent Districts, Palestine 
Exploration Fund. Dawson, Modeim Science in Bible Lands, p. 31 1 
and Appendix. References will be found in these works to the labours 
of Fraas, Schweinfurth, and others. 



lyo GEOLOGY AND HTSTOkY 

wider than now. The details of this we have already 
considered, and have seen that at this time the 
Mediterranean was divided into two basins, and a 
broad fringe of low land, now submerged, lay around 
its eastern end. This was the age of those early 
palaeolithic or palaeocosmic men whose remains are 
found in the caverns and gravels of Europe and Asia. 
What was the condition of Egypt at this time ? The 
Nile must have been flovving in its valley ; but there 
was probably a waterfall or cataract at Silsilis in 
Upper Egypt, and rapids lower down, and the alluvial 
plain was much less extensive than now and forest- 
clad, while the river seems to have been unable to 
reach the Mediterranean and to have turned abruptly 
eastward, discharging into a lake where the Isthmus 
of Suez now is, and probably running thence into the 
Red Sea, so that at this time the waters of the Nile 
approached very near to those of the Jordan, a fact 
which accounts for that similarity of their modern 
fauna which has been remarked by so many naturalists. 
I have myself collected in the deposits of this old 
lake, near Ismailia, fresh- water shells of kinds now 
living in the Upper Nile. If at this time men visited 
the Nile valley, they must have been only a few bold 
hunters in search of game, and having their permanent 
homes on the Mediterranean plains now submerged. 

If they left any remains we should find these in 
caverns or rock shelters, or in the old gravels belonging 
to this period which here and there project through 
the alluvial plain. At one of these places, Jebel 



THE PREHISTORIC EAST 171 

Assart, near Thebes, General Pitt-Rivers has satisfied 
himself of the occurrence of flint chips which may 
have been of human workmanship ; ^ but after a day's 
collecting at the spot, I failed to convince myself 
that the numerous flint flakes in the gravel were 
other than accidental fragments. If they really are 
flint knives they are older than the period we are 
now considering, and must be much older than the 
first dynasty of the Egyptian historic kings.^ These 
gravels were indeed, in early Egyptian times, so 
consolidated that tombs were excavated in them. 
Independently of this case, I know of no trustworthy 
evidence of the residence of the earliest men in Egypt. 
Yet we know that at this time rude hunting tribes 
had spread themselves over Western Asia, and over 
Europe as far as the Atlantic, and were slaying the 
mammoth, the hairy rhinoceros, the wild horse, and 
other animals now extinct. They were the so-called 
' palaeolithic ' or historically antediluvian men, be- 
longing, like the animals they hunted, to extinct 
races, quite dissimilar physically from the historical 
Egyptians. And yet in a recent review of the late 
Miss Edwards's charming work, Pharaohs, Fellahs^ 
and Explorers, she was taken to task by an eminent 
Egyptologist for statements similar to the above. 
On the evidence of two additional finds of flint 
implements on the surface, he affirms the existence 

^ Journal oj ArchcEo!ogical Society, 1881. \\2c^Xi^%\ Jottrnal of the 
American Academy of Sciences. 

^ Dawson, Egypt and Syria, p. 149. 



I70 GEOLOGY AND HISTOl^Y 

wider than now. The details of this we have already 
considered, and have seen that at this time the 
Mediterranean was divided into two basins, and a 
broad fringe of low land, now submerged, lay around 
its eastern end. This was the age of those early 
palaeolithic or palseocosmic men whose remains are 
found in the caverns and gravels of Europe and Asia. 
What was the condition of Egypt at this time ? The 
Nile must have been flovving in its valley ; but there 
was probably a waterfall or cataract at Silsilis in 
Upper Egypt, and rapids lower down, and the alluvial 
plain was much less extensive than now and forest- 
clad, while the river seems to have been unable to 
reach the Mediterranean and to have turned abruptly 
eastward, discharging into a lake where the Isthmus 
of Suez now is, and probably running thence into the 
Red Sea, so that at this time the waters of the Nile 
approached very near to those of the Jordan, a fact 
which accounts for that similarity of their modern 
fauna which has been remarked by so many naturalists. 
I have myself collected in the deposits of this old 
lake, near Ismailia, fresh-water shells of kinds now 
living in the Upper Nile. If at this time men visited 
the Nile valley, they must have been only a few bold 
hunters in search of game, and having their permanent 
homes on the Mediterranean plains now submerged. 

If they left any remains we should find these in 
caverns or rock shelters, or in the old gravels belonging 
to this period which here and there project through 
the alluvial plain. A.t one of these places, Jebel 



THE PREHISTORIC EAST 171 

Assart, near Thebes, General Pitt-Rivers has satisfied 
himself of the occurrence of flint chips which may 
have been of human workmanship ; ^ but after a day's 
collecting at the spot, I failed to convince myself 
that the numerous flint flakes in the gravel were 
other than accidental fragments. If they really are 
flint knives they are older than the period we are 
now considering, and must be much older than the 
first dynasty of the Egyptian historic kings.^ These 
gravels were indeed, in early Egyptian times, so 
consolidated that tombs were excavated in them. 
Independently of this case, I know of no trustworthy 
evidence of the residence of the earliest men in Egypt. 
Yet we know that at this time rude hunting tribes 
had spread themselves over Western Asia, and over 
Europe as far as the Atlantic, and were slaying the 
mammoth, the hairy rhinoceros, the wild horse, and 
other animals now extinct. They were the so-called 
' palaeolithic ' or historically antediluvian men, be- 
longing, like the animals they hunted, to extinct 
races, quite dissimilar physically from the historical 
Egyptians. And yet in a recent review of the late 
Miss Edwards's charming work, PJiaraoJis, Fellahs^ 
and Explorers, she was taken to task by an eminent 
Egyptologist for statements similar to the above. 
On the evidence of two additional finds of flint 
implements on the surface, he affirms the existence 

^ Journal oj Arch(Eo!ogical Society, 1881. Wdjynes.^/ottmal of the 
American Academy of Sciences. 

^ Dawson, Egypt and Syria, p. 149. 



172 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

of man in Egypt at a time when ' the Arabian 
deserts were covered with verdure and intersected 
by numerous streams,' that is, geologically speaking, 
in the early pleistocene or pliocene period, or even 
in the miocene ! 

Singularly enough, therefore, Egypt is to the 
prehistoric annalist not an old country — less old 
indeed than France and England, in both of which 
we find evidence of the residence of the palaeolithic 
cave men of the mammoth age. Thus, when we go 
beyond local history into the prehistoric past, our 
judgment as to the relative age of countries may be 
strangely reversed. 

It is true that in Egypt, as in most other coun- 
tries, flint flakes, or other worked flints, are common 
on the surface and in the superficial soil ; but there is 
no good evidence that they did not belong to historic 
times. A vivid light has been thrown on this point 
by Petrie's discovery, in debris attributed to the age 
of the twelfth dynasty, or approximately that of the 
Hebrew patriarchs, of a wooden sickle of the ordi- 
nary shape, but armed with flint flakes serrated at 
their edges,' though the handle is beautifully curved 
in such a manner as to give a better and more con- 
venient hold than with those now in use. This 
primitive implement presents to us the Egyptian 
farmer of that age reaping his fields of wheat and 
barley with implements similar to those of the palaeo- 
cosmic men. No doubt, at the same time, he used a 

* Kalnin and Garob, Egyptian Exploration Fund publications. 



THE PREHISTORIC EAST 173 

harrow armed with rude flints, and may have used 
flint flakes for cutting wood or for pointing his 
arrows. Yet he was a member of a civilised and 
highly-organised nation, which could execute great 
works of canalisation and embankment, and could 
construct tombs and temples that have not since 
been surpassed. Can we doubt that the common 
people in Palestine and other neighbouring countries 
were equally in the flint age, or be surprised that, 
somewhat later, Joshua used flint knives to circum- 
cise the Israelites? ' How remarkable are these links 
of connection between early Eastern civilisation and 
the stone age ! and they relate to mere flakes, such 
as if found separately might be styled ' palseolithic' 

In accordance with all this, when we examine the 
tenants of the oldest Egyptian tombs, who are known 
to us by their sculptured statues and their carved and 
painted portraits, we find them to be the same with 
the Egyptians of historic times, and not very dis- 
similar from the modern Copts, and we also find that 
their arts and civilisation were not very unlike those 
of comparatively late date. 

There are, however, some points in which the early 
condition of even historic Egypt was different from 
the present or from anything recorded in written 
history. 

I have elsewhere endeavoured, with the aid of my 
friend Dr. Schweinfurth, to restore the appearance of 
the Nile valley when first visited by man in the post- 

• Joshua V. 2, marginal reading. 



174 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

diluvial period. It was then probably densely wooded 
with forests similar to those in the modern Soudan, 
and must have swarmed with animal life in the air, on 
the land, and in the water, including many formidable 
and dangerous beasts. On the other hand, to a people 
derived from the Euphratean plains and accustomed 
to irrigation, it must have seemed a very garden of 
the Lord in its fertility and resources. 

There is good reason to credit the Egyptian tradi- 
tions that the first colonists crossed over from Southern 
Arabia by the Red Sea from that land of Pun to which 
the Egyptians attributed their theology, and settled 
in the neighbourhood of Abydos, and that they made 
their way thence to the northward, at a time when 
the delta was yet a mere swamp,^ and when they had 
slowly to extend their cultivation in Lower Egypt by 
dikes and canals. If we ask when the first immi- 
grants arrived, we are met by the most extravagantly 
varied estimates, derived mainly from attempts to 
deduce a chronology from the dynastic lists of 
Egyptian kings. That these are very uncertain, and 
in part duplicated, is now generally understood, but 
still there is a tendency to ask for a time far exceed- 
ing that for which we have any good warrant in 
authentic history elsewhere. Herodotus estimated 
the time necessary for the deposition of the mud of 
the delta at 20,000 years ; but if we assume that 
this deposit has been formed since the land approxi- 
mately attained to its present level, allowing for 

' Herodotus^ Book II. chap. 15. 






THE PREHISTORIC EAST 175 

some subsidence in the delta in consequence of the 
weight of sediment, and estimating the average rate 
of deposition at one fifteenth of an inch per annum, 
which is as low an amount as can probably be 
assumed, we shall have numbers ranging from 5,300 
to about 7,000 years for the lapse of time since the 
delta was a bay of the Mediterranean. 

It is true that the recent borings in the delta, 
under the officers of the British Engineers, have 
shown a great depth in some places without reaching 
the original bottom of the old bay. Some geologists 
have accordingly inferred from this a much greater 
age for the deposit than that above stated,^ and in 
this they are in one respect justified ; but they have 
to bear in mind that only the upper part of the 
material belongs to the modern period. A vast thick- 
ness is due to the pleistocene and pliocene ages, when 
the Nile was cutting out its valley and depositing the 
excavated material in the sea at its mouth. A careful 
examination of the borings proves by their composi- 
tion that this is actually the case.^ Geologists who 
have been guided by these facts in their estimates of 
time have been taunted as affirming that a great 
diluvial catastrophe occurred while quiet government 
and civilised life were going on in Egypt. The 
evidence for this early date of Egyptian colonisation 
of the Nile valley is, as everyone knows, doubtful, 

' Judd, Report to Royal Society, 1885. 

^ Modern Science in Bible Lands, where evidence of similar dates 
in other countries is stated. 



176 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

and it might be retorted that archaeologists represent 
the Egyptian government as dating from a period 
when the Nile valley was an inland district, and 
when the centres of human population must have 
been, principally at least, on lands now submerged. 

As an example of the fanciful way in which this 
subject is sometimes treated, I may cite the fabulous 
antiquity attributed to the great sphinx of Gizeh. 
We are told that it is the most ancient monument in 
Egypt, antedating the pyramids, and belonging to the 
time of the mystic ' Horshesu,' or people of Horus, of 
Egyptian tradition. In one sense this is true, since 
the sphinx is merely an undisturbed mass of the 
eocene limestone of the plateau. But its form must 
have been given to it after the surrounding limestone 
was quarried away by the builders of the pyramids, 
and consequently long after the founding of Mem- 
phis by the first Egyptian king Mena. The sphinx 
is, in short, a block of stone left by the quarrymen, 
and probably shaped by them as an appropriate 
monument to the workmen who died while the 
neighbouring pyramids were being built. A similar 
monument, of immensely greater antiquity from a 
geological point of view, exists near Montreal, in a 
huge boulder of Laurentian gneiss, placed on a 
pedestal by the workmen employed on the Victoria 
Bridge, in memory of immigrants who died of ship 
fever in the years when the bridge was being built. 

It follows from all this that the monumental his- 
tory of Egypt, extending to about 3000 years B.C., 



THE PREHISTORIC EAST 177 

gives us the whole story of the country, unless 
some chance memorial of a population belonging to 
the post-glacial age should in future be found. There 
are, however, things in Egypt which illustrate pre- 
historic times in other countries, and some of these 
have lately thrown a new and strange light on the 
early history of Palestine, and especially on the Bible 
history. 

One of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, 
whose historical' position was probably between the 
time of Joseph and that of Moses, Amunoph III., is 
believed to have married an Asiatic wife, and under 
her influence, he and his successor, Amunoph IV., or 
Khu en-Aten, seem to have swerved from the old 
polytheism of Egypt, and introduced a new worship, 
that of Aten, a god visibly represented by the disk 
of the sun, and, therefore, in some sense identical 
with Ra, .the chief god of Egypt ; but there was 
something in this new worship offensive to the priests 
of Ra. Perhaps it was regarded as a Semitic or 
Asiatic innovation, or led to the introduction of un- 
popular Semitic priests and officers. Amunoph IV. 
consequently abandoned the royal residence at 
Thebes, and established a new capital at a place 
now called Tel-el-Amarna, almost at the boundary 
of Upper and Lower Egypt, and from this place he 
ruled not only Egypt but a vast region in Western 
Asia, which had been subjected to the Egyptian 
government in the reign of the third Amunoph. 
From these subject districts, extending from the 

M 



178 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

frontiers of Egypt to Asia Minor on the north, and 
to the Euphrates on the east, came great numbers of 
despatches to the Pharaoh, and these were written 
not on papyrus or skin, but on tablets of clay har- 
dened by baking, and the writing was not that of 
Egypt, but the arrow-head script of Chaldea, which 
seems at this time to have been the current writing 
throughout Western Asia.^ 

The scribes of the Egyptian king read these docu- 
ments, answered them as directed by their master, 
docketed them, and laid them up for reference ; and, 
strange to say, a few years ago, Arabs, digging in 
the old mounds, brought them to light, and we have 
before us, translated into English, a great number 
of letters, written from cities of Palestine and its 
vicinity about a hundred years before the Exodus, 
and giving us word-pictures of the politics and con- 
flicts of the Canaanites and Hittites and other 
peoples, long before Joshua came in contact with 
them. Among other things in this correspondence, 
we find remarkable confirmation of the sacred and 
political influence of Jerusalem, which the Bible pre- 
sents to us in the widely separated stories of Mel- 
chisedec, king of Salem, in the time of Abraham, 

' It is possible, however, that it may really have been a language 
of diplomacy merely, and may have been used by the Semitic agents 
of Aaiunoph as a cipher to communicate with the Egyptian court, 
and which could not be read by messengers or enemies acquainted 
only with Hittite or Egyptian hieroglyphics or with the Phamician 
characters. For a similar case see 2 Kings xviii. 26. 



THE PREHISTORIC EAST 179 

and of the suzerainty of Adonizedec, king of Jeru- 
salem, in the time of Joshua. 

At the time in question, Jerusalem was ruled by 
a king or chief, subject to Egypt, but, as in the times 
of Abraham and Joshua, exercising some headship 
over neighbouring cities. He complains of certain 
hostile peoples called chabiri^ a name supposed by 
Zimmel * to be equivalent to Ibrim or Hebrews, which 
to some may seem strange, as the Israelites were, 
according to the generally received chronology, at 
this time in Egypt. We must bear in mind, how- 
ever, that according to the Bible the Israelites were 
not the only 'children of Eber.' The Edomites, 
Moabites, Ammonites, Ishmaelites, and Midianites 
were equally entitled to this name ; and we know, 
from the second chapter of Deuteronomy, that these 
were warlike and intrusive peoples, who had, before 
the Exodus, dispossessed several native tribes, so 
that we do not wonder at the fact that a king of 
Jerusalem might have been suffering from their 
attacks long before the Exodus.''^ It may be noted 
incidentally here, that this wide application of the term 
Hebrew accords with the use of the name Aperiu 
for Semitic peoples other than Israelites in Egypt. 

' Inaugural Lecture, Halle, 1891. Possibly these people were 
merely ' confederate ' Hittites and Amorites (Sayce, Records of the Past). 

2 I cannot agree with Conder that the Exodus took place as early 
as the time of Amunoph III. The evidence we have from Egyptian 
sources plainly indicates one of the immediate successors of Rameses II. 
as the Pharaoh of the Exodus. 

M 2 



i8o GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

We have here also a note on an obscure passage 
in the Hfe of Moses, namely, his apparent want of 
acquaintance with the name Jehovah until revealed 
to him at Horeb.^ Now, as reported in Exodus, 
Moses in that interview addressed God as ' Adon,' 
which is supposed to be the Hebrew equivalent of 
' Aten,' the meaning being Lord. This is a curious 
incidental agreement with the prevalence of the Aten 
worship in Egypt, and shows that this name may 
have been currently used by the Israelites, whose 
God Moses himself calls Adon, till commanded to 
use the name Jehovah. 

A second point of contact of Egypt and Pales- 
tine is in the painting and sculptures of hostile and 
conquered nations in Egyptian temples and tombs. 
These were evidently intended to be portraits, and 
an admirable series of them has been published by 
Mr. Petrie under a commission from the British 
Association for the Advancement of Science. By 
means of these excellent photographs, now before 
me, we can see for ourselves the physiognomy and 
form of head of the Amorite, Philistine, Hittite, and 
many other peoples previously known to us only by 
name and a few historical facts ; and thus with their 
correspondence, as preserved in the Tel-el-Amarna 
tablets, and their pictures as given by Petrie, we 

' Exodus iii. i6 et seqq. This passage has been often misunder- 
stood, but it certainly shows that the name Jehovah had become 
nearly obsolete among the Hebrews in Egypt, and that the name 
usually given to God was Adon or Aten. 



THE PREHISTORIC EAST i8r 

have them before us much as we have the speeches 
and portraits of our contemporaries in the illustrated 
newspapers, and can venture to express some opinion 
as to their ethnic affinities and appearance, and can 
judge more accurately as to the familiar statements 
of the Bible respecting them.^ Lastly, Maspero and 
Tomkins have, with the aid of the names fixed by 
the survey of Western Palestine, revised the lists 
given by Thothmes III., in the temple of Karnak, of 
the places which this Egyptian Alexander had con- 
quered ; and they have thus verified the Hebrew 
geography of the Books of Joshua and Judges. 

Another unexpected acquisition is the solution of 
the mystery which has enshrouded that mysterious 
people known as Hyksos or shepherd kings, who 
invaded Egypt about the time of the Hebrew 
patriarchs, and, after keeping the Egyptians in sub- 
jection for centuries, were finally expelled by the 
predecessors of the Amunoph already referred to. 
They constitute a great feature in early Egyptian 
history, but disappear mysteriously, leaving no trace 
but a few sculptured heads, Turanian in aspect and 
markedly contrasting with those of the native Egyp- 
tians. It now appears that a people of Northern 
Syria and Mesopotamia, known to the Egyptians at 
a later time as Mitanni, and who were neighbours 
of and associated with the Northern Hittites, have 
the features of the Hyksos. It also seems from a 
letter in the Tel-el-Amarna tablets that they spoke 

' Sayce, Races of the Old Testament^ Religious Tract Society. 



i82 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

•\ 

a non-Semitic or Turanian language akin to that of 
the Hittites. Thus we have traced the shepherd 
kings to their origin, and, curiously enough, Cushan- 
rish-athaim, who oppressed the Israelites in the days 
of Othniel, seems to represent a later inroad of the 
same people. 

Such 'restitutions of decayed intelligence' now 
meet us on every hand as the results of modern 
exploration, and are enabling us to bridge over the 
gaps which have separated the geological ages from 
the prehistoric and historic human periods in those 
ancient countries where civilisation seems to have 
originated. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE NEANTHROPIC DISPERSION AND ALLIED 
TOPICS 

The remarkable record of the early distribution of 
the sons of Noah (' Toledoth ' of the sons of Noah) 
in Genesis x. may be regarded, relatively to most of 
the nations it refers to, as a scrap of prehistoric lore 
of the most intensely interesting character. From 
the old * Phaleg ' of Bochart to the recent commen- 
taries of Delitzsch and other German scholars, it has 
received a host of more or less conjectural explana- 
tions ; and while all agree in extolling its value and 
importance as a * Beginning of History,' nothing can 
be more various than the views taken of it. Only 
in the light of the recent discoveries and researches 
already referred to can we arrive at a clear conception 
of its import ; but with these and some common sense 
we may hope to be more fortunate than the older 
interpreters. It is necessary, however, to explain 
here that, for want of a little scientific precision, 
many modern archaeologists still fail in their inter- 
pretations. They tell us that the Toledoth are not 
properly 'ethnological,' but rather * ethnographical,' 



i84 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

and that we are to regard the document as referring, 
not to the genealogical affiliations of nations, but to 
their accidental geographical positions at the time of 
the record. 

Now this is precisely what the writer, with a sure 
scientific instinct, carefully guards against, and ex- 
plicitly informs us he did not intend. He tells us 
that he gives the ^generations of the sons of Noah ' 
and their descendants, and at the ends of the three 
lists relating to these sons, he is careful to say that 
he has given them ' in their lands, each according to 
his language, after their families, in their nations,' or 
the formula is slightly varied into ' after their families, 
after their tongues, in their lands, in their nations.' 
Lastly, in the conclusion of the whole table he 
reiterates, ' These are the families of the sons of 
Noah, according to their generations, after their 
nations.' All these statements, let it be observed, 
are acknowledged to be parts of one (Elohistic) 
document. It is clear, therefore, that the writer 
intends us to understand that the determining elements 
of his classification are neither physical characters 
nor accidents of geographical distribution, but descent 
and original language — two primary and scientific 
grounds of classification, and which common sense 
requires us to adhere to in interpreting the document, 
whose value will depend on the certainty with which 
the writer could ascertain facts as to these criteria : 
criteria which are, of course, less open to the observa- 
tion of later inquirers, who may find difficulty in 



r86 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

ascertaining either descent or original language, and 
in default of these may be obliged to resort to other 
grounds of classification. 

Among modern archaeologists it has been a fruit- 
ful source of controversy whether we should classify 
men according to their skulls or to their tongues ; in 
other words, whether physical characters or linguistic 
should be dominant in our classifications. Neither 
ground is absolutely certain. We may find long and 
short skulls in the same grave-mound, and there are 
intermediate forms which defy certain arrangement. 
In like manner history assures us that people of one 
race have often adopted the language of another. 
True science warns us that we may err unless we give 
a fair valuation to every available character. The 
ethnologist of Genesis considers both physical and 
linguistic characters, but bases his arrangement 
mainly on the sure ground of descent along with 
original language. 

It may be said, however, that if taken in the 
sense obviously intended by the writer, the list will 
not correspond with the facts. A few data have, 
however, to be taken into the account in order to give 
this early writer fair play. 

I. The record has nothing to do with antediluvian 
peoples or with survivors of the Deluge other than 
the sons of Noah, if there were any such. Therefore, 
those ethnologists who are sceptical as to the his- 
torical Deluge, and who postulate an uninterrupted 
advance of man through long ages of semi-bestial 



THE DISPERSION 187 

brutality, have nothing in common with our narrator, 
and cannot possibly understand his statements. 

2. The document does not profess to be a series 
of ethnological inferences from the present or ancient 
characters of different nations, but an actual his- 
torical statement of the known migrations of men 
from a common centre in Shinar, the Sumir of the 
Chaldeans. 

3. It relates only to the primary distribution of 
men from their alleged centre over certain districts 
of Western Asia, Eastern Europe, and Northern 
Africa, and does not profess to know anything of 
their subsequent migrations or history. 

4. It is thus not responsible for those later, even 
if very ancient, changes which displaced one race by 
another, or obliged one race to move on by the 
pressure of another, nor for any changes of language 
or mixtures of races which may have occurred in 
these movements. 

5. It affirms nothing as to the physical characters 
of the races referred to, except as they may be 
inferred from heredity, but it implies some resemblance 
in language between the derivatives of the same 
stock, and this, be it observed, notwithstanding the 
added narrative of the confusion of tongues at Babel,* 
which the narrator does not regard as interfering 
with the fact of languages originally forming a few 
branches proceeding from a common stock. 

' Held by some to belong to another (Jahvistic) document, but 
certainly incorporated by the early editor. 



i88 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

6. If we ask what our narrator supposed to be 
the original or Noachic tongue, we might infer from 
his three lines of descent, and from the locality of the 
dispersion and the episode of Nimrod's prehistoric 
kingdom, that the primitive language of Chaldea 
would be the original stem ; and this we now know 
from authentic written records to have been an 
agglutinate language of the type usually known as 
Turanian, and more closely allied to the Tartar and 
Chinese tongues than to other kinds of speech. It 
would follow that what we now call Semitic and 
Aryan or Japhetic forms of speech must, in the view 
of our ancient authority, date from the sequelae of the 
great ' confusion of tongues/ 

These points being premised, we can clear away 
the fogs which have been gathered around this little 
luminous spot in the early history of the world, and 
can trace at least the principal ethnic lines of radiation 
from it. Though the writer gives us three main 
branches of affiliation of the children of Noah, he 
really refers to six principal lines of migration, three 
of them belonging to that multifarious progeny of 
Ham, in which he seems to include both the Turanian 
and Negroid types of our ordinary classifications, as 
well as some of the brown and yellow races. 

One of the lines of affiliation of Ham leads 
eastward and is not traced ; but if the Cushite people, 
who are said to have gone to the land which in earlier 
antediluvian times was that of ' gold and bedolach 
and shoham stone,' that is, along the fertile valley of 



THE DISPERSION 189 

Susiana, were those primitive people, preceding the 
Elamites of history, who are said to have spoken an 
agglutinate language,^ then we have at least one 
stage of this migration. A second line leads west to 
the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, to Egypt and 
to North Africa. A third passes south-westward 
through Southern Arabia and across the Red Sea 
into interior Africa. To the sons of Japhet are 
ascribed two lines of migration, one through Asia 
Minor and the northern coasts of the Mediterranean ; 
another north-west, around the Black Sea. The 
Semites would seem to have been a less wandering 
people at the first, but subsequently to have encroached 
on and mingled with the Hamites, and especially on 
that western line of migration leading to the Mediter- 
ranean. All this can be gathered from undisputed 
national names in the several lines of migration above 
sketched, without touching on the more obscure and 
doubtful names or referring to tribes which remained 
near the original centre. We must, however, inquire 
a little more particularly into the movements bearing 
on Palestine and Egypt. 

' Sayce {Hibbert Lectures) and Bagster's Records oj the Past. 
Inscriptions of Cyrus published in the last volume of the latter appear 
to set at rest the vexed questions relating to early Elam. It would 
seem that in the earliest times Cushites and Semitic Elamites 
contended for the fertile plains and the mountains east of the Tigris, 
and were finally subjugated by Japhetic Medes and Persians. Thus 
this region first formed a part of the Cushite Nimrodic empire 
(Genesis ii. 11, x. 8) ; it then became the seat of a conquering Elamite 
power (Genesis xiv. i to 4) ; and was finally a central part of the 
Medo- Persian empire. All this agrees with the Bible and the 
insciiptions, as well as in the main with Herodotus. 



iQo GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

So far as the writer in Genesis is informed, he 
does not seem to be aware of any sons of Japhet 
having colonised Palestine or Egypt. It was only in 
the later reflux of population that the sons of Javan 
gained a foothold in these regions. They were both 
colonised primarily by Hamites and subsequently 
intruded on by Semites. 

Here a little prehistoric interlude noted by the 
writer, or by an author whom he quotes, gives a 
valuable clue not often attended to. The oldest son 
of Ham, Cush, begat Nimrod, the mighty hunter and 
prehistoric conqueror, who organised the first empire 
in that Euphratean plain which subsequently became 
the nucleus of the Babylonian and Assyrian power. 
The site of his kingdom cannot be doubted, for 
cities well known in historic times. Babel, Erech, 
Accad, and Calneh, were included in it, as well as 
probably Nineveh. The first point which I wish to 
make in this connection is that we cannot suppose 
this to have been a Semitic empire. Its nucleus 
must have been composed of Nimrod's tribal con- 
nections, who were Hamites and presumably Cushites. 
He is, indeed, said to have gone into or invaded the 
land of Ashur, and if by this is meant the Semitic 
Ashur, he must have been hostile to these people, 
as indeed the Chaldeans were in later times. The 
next point to be noted is that the Nimrodic 
empire must have originated at a time when the 
Cushites were still strong on the Lower Euphrates, 
and before that great movement of these people 



THE DISPERSION 191 

which carried them across Arabia to the Upper 
Nile, and ultimately caused the name Cush or 
Kesh to be almost exclusively applied to the 
Ethiopians of Africa. Now is this history, or mere 
legend ? 

The answer of archaeology is not doubtful. We 
have in the earliest monuments of Chaldea evidence 




HEAD ILLUSTRATING THE MOST ANCIENT TYPE OF 

CUSHITE TURANIAN, FROM TEL-LOH (after cle Sarzec). 
The cap is perhaps an imitation of the antediluvian 
shell-caps, like that of the ' man of Mentorie. '. 

that there was a pre-Semitic population, to whom, 
indeed, it is believed that the Semites who invaded 
the country owed much of their civilisation. A recent 
writer has said that * outside of the Bible we know 
nothing of Nimrod,' but others see a trace of him in 
the legendary hero of Chaldean tradition, Gisdubar 
or Gingamos, while others think that, as Na-marod, 



192 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

he may be the original of Merodach, the tutelary god 
of Babylon. Independently of this, there was cer- 
tainly an early Chaldean and ' Turanian ' empire, 
which must have had some founder, whatever his 
name, and which was not Semitic or Aryan, and 
therefore what an early writer would call Hamitic. 
Further, our author traces from this region the great 
Cushite line of migration, which includes such well- 
known names as Seba, Sabta, Sheba and Dedan, into 
Arabia on the way to Africa. Here the Egyptian 
monuments take up the tale, and inform us of a South 
Arabian and East African people, the people of Pun 
or Punt, represented as like to themselves and to the 
Kesh or Ethiopians, and who thus correspond to the 
Arabian Cushites of Genesis. In accordance with 
this the Abyssinian of to-day is scarcely distinguish- 
able from the old Punites as represented on the 
Egyptian monuments.^ 

Thus the primitive Cushite kingdom and one of 
the great lines of Cushite migration are established 
by ancient monuments. Let it be further observed 
that, as represented in Egypt, these primitive 
Ethiopians were not black, but of a reddish or 
brownish colour, like the Egyptians themselves, and 
that their migration explains the resemblance of the 
customs and religion of early Egypt to those of 
Babylonia, and the ascription by the Egyptians of 
the origin of their gods to the land of Pun. 

' The recent discoveries of G laser with reference to the early 
civilisation of Southern Arabia also bear on this point. 



THE DISPERSION 193 

The remaining sons of Ham, Mizraim, Put and 
Canaan, are not mentioned in connection with the 
old Nimrodic kingdom, and seem to have moved 
westward at a very early period. They were already 
' in the land,' and apparently constituted a consider- 
able citizen population before the migration of 
Abraham. 

Mizraim represents the twin populations of the 
delta and Lower Egypt, and the Tel-el-Amarna 
tablets inform us that long before the time of Moses 
Mitzor was the ordinary name of Egypt, while we 
know that its early population was closely allied in 
features and language to the Cushites. 

Canaan ^ heads a central line of migration, and 
Sidon and Cheth are said to have been his leading 
sons. The first represents the Phoenician maritime 
power of Northern Syria, the second that great nation 
known to the Egyptians as Kheta and to the 
Assyrians as Khatti, whose territory extended from 
Carchemish on the Euphrates through the plain of 
Coele-Syria to Hebron in Southern Palestine, and not 
improbably into the delta. They were a people 
whose language was allied to that of Cushite Chal- 
dea,^ whose features were of a coarser type than those 
of their more southern confreres^ and who, according 
to the Egyptian annals, were closely allied with the 

' Canaan with our old historian is the name of a man, but it came 
to designate first the ' low country ' or coast region of Western 
Palestine, and then the whole of Palestine. 

- Conder and others call it Turanian. 

N 



196 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

this kind (Horites, Avvites, &c.) ^ were known, whose 
affinities had been lost ; and it is not necessary to 
suppose that these were remnants of antediluvians, 
since what we know in modern times of the wanderers 
on the outskirts of great migrations sufficiently ac- 
counts for their existence. 

This is, I think, a fair summary of the testimony 
of the writer of Genesis x., as compared with the 
general evidence of history and archaeology. But we 
have something further to learn from what may be 
called the fossil remains of prehistoric peoples as 
embodied in the Egyptian monuments, which are 
conversant with all the nations around the eastern 
end of the Mediterranean. 

The Egyptians divided the nations known to them 
into four groups, of which they have given us several 
representations in tombs and public buildings. One 
of these consisted of their own race. The other three 
were as follows : (i) Southern peoples mostly of 
dark complexions, ranging from light brown to black. 
These included the Cushites, Punites, and negroes. 

(2) Western peoples mostly of fair complexions in- 
habiting the islands and northern coasts of the 
Mediterranean, the ' Hanebu ' or chiefs of the north 
or of the isles, with some populations of North 
Africa, the so-called white Lybians and Maxyans. 

(3) Northern or north-eastern peoples, or those of 
Syria and the neighbouring parts of Western Asia, 
Amorites, Hittites, Edomites, Arabs, &c., usually 
represented as of yellowish complexion. 

' Deuteronomy ii. 



THE DISPERSION 197 

The first of these divisions evidently corresponds 
with the line of Cushite migration of Genesis, extend- 
ing from Shinar through Southern Arabia, Nubia, 
and Ethiopia, and of which the negroes are apparently 
degraded members pushed in advance of the others, 
while the populations of Pun and Kesh, the southern 
Arabians and their relatives in Africa, closely re- 
semble, as figured in the monuments, the Egyptians 
themselves. 

The second group of the Egyptian classification 
represents those so-called Aryan peoples of Europe 
and its islands, and parts of Northern Africa, of 
whom the Greeks are a typical race, and who in 
Genesis are said to have possessed the ' Isles of the 
Gentiles ' ; though in the wave of migration from 
the east they were in many places preceded by 
non-Aryan races, Pelasgians, Iberians, &c., possibly 
wandering Hamitic tribes, while they were also in- 
vaded by that scattering abroad of the Phoenician 
Canaanites referred to in Genesis. They are repre- 
sented in the monuments as people with European 
features, fair complexions, and sometimes fair hair 
and blue eyes. 

The third group is the most varied of the whole, 
because its seat in Syria was a meeting-place of many 
tribes. Its most ancient members, the Phoenicians 
and allied nations, were, according to the monuments, 
men resembling the Egyptian and Cushite type, and 
these, no doubt, were those pre-Semitic and pre- 
historic nations of Canaan referred to in the remark- 



198 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

able notes regarding the Emim, Zuzim, &c., in the 
second chapter of Deuteronomy, which may be re- 
garded as a foot-note to the Toledoth of Genesis x. 
These aborigines were invaded by men of different 
types. First, we find in the monuments that the 
Amorites of the Palestine hills were a fair people 
with somewhat European features, like some of the 
present populations of the Lebanon. When re- 
turning over the Lebanon in 1884 we met a large 
company of men with camels and donkeys carrying 
merchandise. They were fair-complexioned and with 
brown hair, and from their features I might have 
supposed they were Scottish Highlanders. I was 
told they were Druses, and they were evidently much 
like, as are indeed many of the modern fellaheen of 
the Palestine hills, the Amar as they are pictured in 
Egypt. These white peoples, though reckoned in 
the Bible as Hamites, may have had a mixture of 
Aryan blood. It is to be noted here that the 
Amorite chiefs, Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre, named 
as confederate with Abraham, have non-Semitic 
names. 

A later inroad was that of the Hittites, evidently 
a people having affinity with the Philistines and 
Egyptians, but whose chiefs and nobles seem to have 
been of Tartar blood, like the modern Turks. The 
names of their kings seem also to have been non- 
Semitic. Later, the great westward migration of 
Semitic peoples, to which that of Abraham himself 
belongs, not only introduced the Israelites but many 



rHB DISPERSION 199 

nations of Semitic or mixed blood, the Moabites, 
Ammonites, Edomites, Ishmaelites, &c., whom we 
find figuring in the Egyptian monuments as yellow 
or brownish people with a Jewish style of features, 
and all of whom, as mentioned above, would be known 
to the Egyptians and Canaanites as ' Hebrews.' ^ 

Thus the monuments confirm the Jewish record, 
and the confusion which some ethnologists have 
introduced into the matter arises from their applying 
in aTi arbitrary manner the special tests of physical 
and philological characteristics, and neglecting to 
distinguish the primary migrations of men from sub- 
sequent intrusions. 

Another singular point of agreement is that, just 
as in Egypt we find men civilised from the first, so 
we find elsewhere. In Egypt writing and literature 
date from before the time of Abraham. In like 
manner we have no monumental evidence of any 
time when the Accadian people of Babylonia were 
destitute of writing and science, and we now find 
that there were learned scribes in all the cities of 
Canaan, and that the Phoenicians and Southern 
Arabians knew their alphabet ages before Moses 
while even the Greeks seem to have known alpha- 
betic writing long before the Mosaic age. ^ These 
men, in short, were descendants of the survivors of 

' This is independent of the question whether we regard the name 
Eber as that of an ancestor, or merely of men from beyond the 
Euphrates. 

'^ Petrie, Tllahun, Kahun and Garoh, 1891. 



200 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

the Noachian Deluge, and therefore civiHsed from 
the first ; and though we have no certain evidence of 
letters before the Flood, except the statement of the 
author of the Babylonian deluge tablets, that Noah 
hid written archives at Sippara before going into 
the ark, yet it is quite certain that men who could 
build Noah's ship are not unworthy ancestors of the 
Phoenician seamen, who probably launched their barks 
on the Mediterranean before the death of Noah himself. 
Thus, whatever value we may attach to the record 
in Genesis, we cannot refuse to admit that it is 
thoroughly consistent with itself and with the testi- 
mony of the oldest monuments of Asia and Africa, 
as it is also with the evidence of the geological 
changes of the pleistocene and early modern 
epoch. 

In like manner the Egyptian inscriptions of the 
conquests of Thothmes III. give us a pre-Mosaic 
record of Palestinian geography corresponding with 
that of the Hebrew conquest, and the pictures of 
sieges coincide with the excavations of Petrie at 
Lachish in restoring those Canaanite towns, * walled 
up to heaven,' which excited the fear of the Israelites. 
Neither can we scoff at the illiteracy of men who 
were carrying on diplomatic correspondence in written 
despatches before Genesis itself was compiled. Nor 
can we doubt the military prowess of these people, 
their chariot forces, their sculptured idols and 
images, their wealth of gold and silver, their agri- 
cultural and artistic skill. All these are amply 



THE DISPERSTON 201 

proved by the monuments of the Egyptians and the 
Hittites.^ 

Palestine thus presents a prehistoric past parallel 
with the earlier years of Egypt. It has, however, a 
still earlier period, for in Palestine, as stated in a 
previous chapter, we have evidence of the existence 
of man long before the dispersion of the sons of 
Noah. To appreciate this evidence, we must go 
back, as in the case of Egypt, to the pre-human 
period. All along the coast of Palestine, from Jaffa 
to the northern limit of old Phoenicia, the geological 
traveller sees evidence of a recent submergence, in 
the occurrence of sandstone, gravel, aqd limestone 
with shells and other marine remains of species still 
living in the Mediterranean. These are the relics of 
that pleistocene submergence already referred to, in 
which the Nile valley was an arm of the sea and 
Africa was an island. No evidence has b'jen found 
of the residence of man in Palestine in this period, 
when, as the sea washed the very bases of the hills, 
and the plains were under water, it was certainly not 
very well suited to his abode. The climate was also 
probably more severe than at present, and the glaciers 
of Lebanon must have extended nearly to the sea. 

' Bliss, in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration 
Fund for April 1892, figures many interesting objects, found in the 
lower or Amorite stratum of the mound of Tell-el-Hesy (Lachish). 
We have here a bronze battle-axe and heads of javelins that may have 
been used against the soldiers of Joshua, and axes and pottery of 
equally early date, along with multitudes of flint flakes, arrow heads, 
&c., used at this early time. It is to be hoped that the further 
exploration of this site may yield yet more interesting results. 



202 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

This was the time of the so-called glacial period in 
Western Europe. 

This, however, was succeeded by that post-glacial 
period in which, as already explained, the area of 
the Mediterranean was much smaller than at present, 
and the land encroached far upon the bed of the sea. 
This, the second continental period, is that in which 
man makes his first undoubted appearance in Europe, 
and we have evidence of the same kind in Syria, 
to which I have already directed attention in the 
description of the caverns of the Lebanon, in 
Chapter IV. 

That the occupancy of these caves is very ancient 
is proved by the fact that the old Egyptian con- 
querors, who cut a road for themselves over these 
precipices before the Exodus, seem to have found 
them in the same state as at present, while farther 
south ancient Syrian tombs are excavated in similar 
bone breccias. But there is better evidence than this. 
The bones and teeth in these caves belong not to the 
animals which have inhabited the Lebanon in historic 
times, but to creatures like the hairy rhinoceros and 
the bison, now extinct, which could not have lived in 
this region since the comparatively modern period in 
which the Mediterranean resumed its dominion over 
that great plain between Phoenicia and Cyprus. This 
we know had been submerged long before the first 
migrations of the Hamites into Phoenicia, even before 
the entrance of those comparatively rude tribes which 
seem to have inhabited the country before the Phoeni- 



THE DISPERSION 203 

cian colonisation.^ Unfortunately no burials of these 
early men have yet been found, and perhaps the 
Lebanon caves were only their summer sojourns on 
hunting expeditions. They were, however, probably 
of the same stock with the races (the Cro-magnon 
and Canstadt) of the so-called mammoth age in 
Western Europe, who have left similar remains. Thus 
we can carry man in the Lebanon back to that abso- 
lutely prehistoric age which preceded the Noachian 
Deluge and the dispersion of the Noachidae.^ 

If in imagination we suppose ourselves to visit 
the caves of the Nahr-el-Kelb pass, when they were 
inhabited by these early men, we should find them to 
be tall muscular people, clothed in skins, armed with 
flint-tipped javelins and flint hatchets, and cooking 
the animals caught in the chase in the mouths of 
their caves. They were probably examples of the 
ruder and less civilised members of that powerful and 
energetic antediluvian population which had appa- 
rently perfected so many arts, and the remains of 
whose more advanced communities are now buried 
in the silt of the sea bottom. If we looked out 
westward on what is now the Mediterranean, we 
should see a wide wooded or grassy plain as far as 
eye could reach, and perhaps might discern vast 
herds of elephant, rhinoceros, and bison wandering 

• Some of these tribes also lived in caves, as that of Ant Elias, but 
the animals they consumed are those now living in the Lebanon. 

2 Dawson, Trans. Vict. Tistitute, May 1884; alsD Modern Science 
in Bible Lands. 



204 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

over these plains in their annual migrations. Possibly 
on the far margin of the land we might see the smoke 
of antediluvian towns long ago deeply submerged in 
the sea. 

The great diluvial catastrophe which closed this 
period, and finally introduced the present geographical 
conditions, we have seen good reason to identify with 
the historical Deluge, and the old peoples of the age 
of the mammoth and rhinoceros were antediluvians, 
and must have perished from the earth before the 
earliest migration of the Beni Noah. 

Putting together the results referred to in the 
preceding pages, we may restore the prehistoric ages 
of the Eastern Mediterranean under the following 
statements : 

1. In the period immediately preceding human 
occupancy, the land of Palestine, Egypt, and Arabia 
participated in the great pleistocene depression, 
accompanied by a rigorous climate. 

2. The next stage was one of continental elevation, 
in which the borders of the Mediterranean were dry 
land, and vast plains in this basin, and even in the 
Western Atlantic, were open to human migration. In 
this age palaeocosmic men took up their abode all over 
Western Asia, Europe, and Northern Africa, and 
probably occupied broad lands since submerged. At 
this period the region was inhabited by the mammoth, 
rhinoceros, bison, and other large animals now alto- 
gether or locally extinct. 

3. The earlier part of this post-glacial or antedi- 



THE DISPERSION 205 

luvian period was one of mild climatal conditions, 
followed by a slight return of the conditions of the 
previous glacial age. 

4. The period was terminated by a great sub- 
mergence, accompanied with vast destruction of 
animal and human life ; and of comparatively short 
duration, corresponding to the historical Deluge. 

5. From this depression the more limited conti- 
nents of the modern period were elevated, and man 
again overspread them from his primitive seats in 
the Euphratean region, as recorded in the tenth 
chapter of Genesis. 

6. In this early migration the Biblical Hamites, 
forming one of the groups of men vaguely known as 
Turanian, first spread themselves over Palestine and 
Egypt, and founded the early Phoenician, Canaanite, 
Mizraimite, and Cushite tribes and nations. 

7. In early historic times Semitic peoples, 
Hebrews and others from the east, and Mongoloid 
peoples from the north, migrated into Palestine 
and dominated and mixed with the primitive 
tribes, finally penetrating into Egypt and esta- 
blishing there the dominion known as that of the 
Hyksos. The historical Moabites, Ammonites, 
Ishmaelites, and Hittites were peoples of this 
character, having a substratum of Hamite blood 
with aristocracies of Semitic or Tartar origin. 

It will be observed that while archaeological 
evidence tends to illustrate and corroborate that 
wonderful collection of early historical documents 



2o6 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

contained in the Book of Genesis, and to prove 
their great antiquity, on the other hand these 
documents prove to be the most precious sources 
of information as to the antediluvian age, the great 
Flood, the earliest dispersion of men, the old Nimrodic 
empire, the connections of Asiatic and African 
civilisation, and other matters connected with the 
origins of the oldest nations, respecting which we 
have little other written history. 

We thus learn that, relatively to Bible history, 
there is no prehistoric age, since it carries us back 
beyond the Deluge to the origin of man, so that we 
might properly restrict this term in its narrower 
signification to those parts of the world not .covered 
by this primitive history. It is true that a tide of 
criticism hostile to the integrity of Genesis has been 
rising for some years ; but it seems to beat vainly 
against a solid rock, and the ebb has now evidently 
set in. The battle of historical and linguistic criticism 
may indeed rage for a time over the history and date 
of the Mosaic law, but in so far as Genesis is con- 
cerned it has been practically decided by scientific 
exploration. 

Since writing the preceding pages I have met 
with a remarkable paper by Mr. Horatio Hale in the 
Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada} It is 
one which should commend itself to the study of 
every Biblical scholar and archaeologist ; but is 
contained in a periodical which perhaps meets the 
» Vol. IX. Sec. II. 1891. 



THE DISPERSION 207 

eyes of few of them. In this paper he maintains the 
importance of language as a ground of anthropo- 
logical classification, and then uses his wide knowledge 
of the languages of American aborigines, and other rude 
races, to show that the grammatical complexity and 
logical perfection of these languages implies a high 
intellectual capacity in their original framers, and 
that where such complex and perfect languages are 
spoken by very rude tribes like the Australian 
aborigines, they originated with cultivated and 
intellectual peoples — in the case of the Australian, 
with the civilised primitive Dravidians of India. He 
thus shows that languages, like alphabets, have 
undergone a process of degradation, so that those 
of modern times are less perfect exponents of 
thought than those which preceded them, and that 
primitive man in his earliest state must have been 
endowed with as high intellectual powers as any of 
his descendants. 

On similar grounds he shows that it is not in the 
outlying barbarous races that we are to look for truly 
primitive man, since here we have merely degraded 
types, and that the primitive centres of man and 
language must have been in the old historic lands of 
Western Asia and Northern Africa. On this view 
the time necessary for the development of the arts ot 
civilisation and of extensive colonisation would not 
be great. * In five centuries a single human pair 
planted in a fertile oasis might have given origin to 
a people of five hundred thousand souls, numerous 



2o8 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

enough to have sent out emi;jrations to the nearest 
inviting lands.' The same lapse of time would have 
sufficed to develop agriculture, to domesticate animals, 
and to make some progress in architectural and other 
arts of life. He quotes the remarkable passage of 
Reclus^ as to the agency of woman in the inventions 
of early art, and shows that this accords with more 
modern exper'ence among the less civilised nations. 
It is obvious that all this tends to bring scientific 
anthropology into the closest relation with the old 
Biblical history, though Hale, in deference, perhaps, 
to modern prejudices, does not refer to this. 

In the passage quoted by Hale, Reclus says : ' It 
is to woman that mankind owes all that has made us 
men.' Following this hint of the ingenious French 
writer, we may imagine the first man and woman 
inhabiting some fertile region, rich in fruits and other 
natural products, and subsisting at first on the un- 
cultivated bounty of nature. With the birth of their 
first child, perhaps before, would come the need of 
shelter either in some dry cavern or booth of poles 
and leaves or bark, carpeted perhaps with moss or 
boughs of pine. This would be the first 'home,' 
with the woman for its housekeeper. We may 
imagine the man bringing to it the lamb or kid whose 
dam he had killed, and the woman, w^'th motherly 
instinct, pitying the little orphan and training it to be 
a domestic pet, the first of tamed animals. She, too, 
would store grain, seeds and berries for domestic use, 

Primitive Folk (Contemporary Science Scries), p. 58. 



THE DISPERSION 209 

and some of these germinating would produce patches 
of grain, or shrubs, or fruit trees around the hut. 
Noticing these and protecting them, she would be 
the first gardener and orchardist. The woman and her 
children might add to the cultivated plants or domes- 
ticated quadrupeds and birds ; and the man would 
be induced, in the intervals of hunting and fishing, to 
guard, protect, and fence them. 

When the boys grew up, to one of them might be 
assigned the care of the sheep and goats, to the other 
the culture of the little farm, while they might aid 
their father in erecting a better and more artistic 
habitation, the first attempt at architecture, and in 
introducing artificial irrigation to render their field 
more fertile. Is not this little romance of M. Elie 
Reclus perfectly in harmony with the old familiar 
story in Genesis, and also with the most recent 
results of modern science ? 



2IO GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



CHAPTER XIII 

SUMMARY OF RESULTS 

It may be well, in conclusion, to sum up the general 
truths we have arrived at in relation to the place of 
man in the great and long-continued drama of the 
earth's geological history. 

I. We have found no link of derivation connec- 
ting man with the lower animals which preceded him. 
He appears before us as a new departure in creation, 
without any direct relation to the instinctive life of 
the lower animals. The earliest men are no less men 
than their descendants, and up to the extent of their 
means, inventors, innovators, and introducers of new 
modes of life, just as much as they. We have not 
even been able as yet to trace man back to the 
harmless golden age. As we find him in the caves and 
gravels he is already a fallen man, out of harmony 
with his environment and the foe of his fellow 
creatures, contriving against them instruments of 
destruction more fatal than those furnished by nature 
to the carnivorous wild beasts. Yet we would fain 
believe in an Edenic age of innocence ; and physio- 
logical probability, as well as the old story in Genesis, 



SUMMARY OF RESULTS 



211 



Scheme of possible Correlation of the Geological 
and Historical Records as to Early Man, as 
the Facts appear in the present Stage of Inves- 
tigation, May 1894. 



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Deluge 


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212 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

demands that we should suppose a primitive condition 
in which man, careless and happy, should subsist on 
the spontaneous bounty of nature in some favoured 
*■ garden of the Lord.' 

2. If w^e inquire as to the nature of the interval 
which separates man from the lower animals, we find 
that it exists w^ith reference both to his rational and 
physical nature. With respect to the first we may 
affirm in man the existence of a lower (psychical) 
intelligence, similar to that of the inferior animals, 
and of a spiritual nature allying him with higher 
intelligences, and with God Himself Rightly con- 
sidered, this places the doctrine of creation in a very 
firm position. Those who deny it must adopt one of 
two alternatives. Either they must refuse to admit 
the evidence in man of any nature higher than that 
of brutes — a conclusion which common sense, as well 
as mental science, must always refuse to admit — or 
they must attempt to bridge over the ' chasm,' as it 
has been called, which separates the instinctive nature 
of the animal from the rational and moral nature of 
man — an effort confessedly futile. 

3. As to the body of man, the case is different, but 
still perfectly in harmony with the idea of his higher 
nature. Man, as to his body, is confessedly an 
animal, of the earth earthy. He is also a member of 
the province vertebrata, and the class inannnalia ; 
but in that class he constitutes not only a distinct 
species and genus, but even a distinct family, or 
order. In other words, he is the sole species of his 



SUMMARY OF RESULTS 213 

genus, and of his family, or order. He is thus 
separated, by a great gap, from all the animals 
nearest to him ; and even if we admit the doctrine, 
as yet unproved, of the derivation of one species 
from another in the case of the lower animals, we 
are unable to supply the ' missing links ' which would 
be required to connect man with any group of in- 
ferior animals. This physical distinctness has also 
a special significance, inasmuch as it depends on 
certain negative peculiarities such as the absence of 
clothing, of natural weapons of attack and defence, 
as well as on the positive properties of the erect 
posture, the hands adapted to various kinds of mani- 
pulation, and the special sensory gifts. Thus viewed 
in relation to his environment, his wants as well as 
his possessions in regard to structures and powers, 
would be fatal to any creature not possessed of his 
intelligence, and we cannot conceive how such priva- 
tions or such gifts could spontaneously arise in 
nature. 

4. No fact of science is more certainly established 
than the recency of man in geological time. Not 
only do we find no trace of his remains in the older 
geological formations, but we find no remains even of 
the animals nearest to him ; and the conditions of 
the world in those periods seem to unfit it for the 
residence of man. If, following the usual geological 
system, we divide the whole history of the earth into 
four great periods, extending from the oldest rocks 
known to us, the eozoic, or archaean, up to the 



214 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

modern, we find remains of man, or his works, only 
in the latest of the four, and in the later part of this. 
In point of fact, there is no indisputable proof of the 
presence of man until we reach the early modern 
period. This is, no doubt, what was to have been 
expected on the supposition of the orderly develop- 
ment of the chain of animal life in the long geologic 
eons ; but it is not by any means the only hypothesis 
that was possible when, for example, the Book of 
Genesis was written. A more fanciful cosmologist 
might at that time have given precedence to man, 
and might have supposed that the other animals 
were produced later, and for his benefit, or his injury. 
This is the view of the sacred writer himself with 
respect to the local group of animals intended to be 
in immediate association with the first man. Re- 
stricted in this way, the statement of a group of 
animals created with man in his earliest abode is not 
contradictory to the order in Genesis first, nor 
scientifically improbable. We have seen that in any 
case the deductions from geology are in harmony 
with the earliest revelations made to the human 
mind on the subject, and in accordance with all the 
later facts of actual history. 

5. The absolute date of the first appearance of 
man cannot perhaps be fixed within a few years or 
centuries, either by human chronology or by the 
science of the earth. It would seem, however, that 
the Bible history, as well as such hints as we can 
gather from the history of other nations, limits us to 



SUMMARY OF RESULTS 215 

two or three thousand years before the Deluge of 
Noah, while some estimates of the antiquity of man, 
based on physical changes or ancient history, or on 
philology, greatly exceed this limit. If the earliest 
men were those of the river gravels and caves, men 
of the ' mammoth age,' or of the ' palaeolithic ' or 
palaeocosmic period, we can form some definite ideas 
as to their possible antiquity. They colonised the 
continents immediately after the elevation of the land 
from the great subsidence which closed the pleisto- 
cene or glacial period, in what has been called the 
' continental ' period of the post-glacial age, because 
the new lands then raised out of the sea exceeded in 
extent those which we have now. We have, as 
stated in a previous chapter, some measures of the 
date of this great continental elevation, and know 
that its distance from our time must fall within about 
eight thousand years. Many indications, both in 
Europe and America, lead to the belief that it is 
physically impossible that man could have colonised 
the northern hemisphere at an earlier date than this 
geologically recent continental period. 

6. There is but one species of man, though many 
races and varieties ; and these races or varieties seem 
to have developed themselves at a very early time 
and have shown a remarkable fixity in their later 
history. There is reason to believe, however, from 
various physiological facts, that this is a very general 
law of varietal forms, v/hich are observed to appear 
rapidly or suddenly, and then in favourable circum- 



2i6 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

stances to be propagated continuously. It would 
seem also to apply to the introduction of forms 
regarded as species, since it is not unusual to find a 
genus at or near its origin represented by its 
maximum number of specific forms. 

7. The precise locality of the origin of man can 
be defined on probable grounds as in a temperate 
region, supplied with the vegetable productions most 
useful to him in a natural state, and free from destruc- 
tive animal rivals. We can scarcely suppose that 
this locality can have been in any of those parts of 
the world in which man finds the greatest difficulty 
in subsisting, or becomes most degraded, though this 
paradoxical view has been held by some archaeolo- 
gists. It must rather have been in some fertile and 
salubrious region of the northern hemisphere ; and 
probability as well as tradition points to those regions 
in South-Western Asia which have not only been the 
earliest historical abodes of man, but are also the 
centres of the animals and plants most useful to him. 
It is interesting to note here that Haeckel, on purely 
physical grounds, decides against Europe, Africa, 
Australia, and America, and concludes that 'most 
circumstances indicate Southern Asia.' 

8. It is to be observed, however, that the diluvial 
interlude gives a double origin of man ; but the 
historical accounts of the ncocosrnic dispersion, as 
we have already seen, refer us in this case also to the 
same regions of South-Western Asia. The traditions 
which ascribe human origin to a ' Mountain of the 



SUMMARY OF RESULTS 217 

North ' refer to the second dispersion, and coincide 
with the Ararat of Genesis and the ' Mountain of the 
North ' on which the ship of Hasisadra was supposed 
by the Chaldeans to have grounded. 

9. We are now in a position to correlate the 
historical Deluge with the great geographical changes 
which closed the palanthropic age. This, when 
regarded as an established fact, furnishes the solution 
of many of the most disputed questions of anthro- 
pology. The misuse of the Deluge in the early 
history of geology, in employing it to account for 
changes that took place long before the advent of 
man, certainly should not cause us to neglect its 
legitimate uses, when these arise in the progress of 
investigation. It is evident that if this correlation be 
accepted as probable, it must modify many views 
now held as to the antiquity of man. In that case, 
the modern rubble spread over plateaus and in river 
valleys, far above the reach of the present floods, may 
be accounted for, not by the ordinary action of the 
existing streams, but by the abnormal action of 
currents of water diluvial in their character. Further, 
since the historical Deluge cannot have been of very 
long duration, the physical changes separating the 
deposits containing the remains of palaeocosmic men 
from those of later date would, in like manner, be 
accounted for, not by slow processes of subsidence, 
elevation, and erosion, but by causes of a more abrupt 
and cataclysmic character. 

Finally, it has been the tendency of modern geo- 



2i8 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 

logical and archaeological discovery to attach more 
and more value and importance to the ancient records 
of the human race, and especially to those precious 
documents which have been preserved to our time in 
the Book of Genesis. 

We have merely glanced cursorily at a few of the 
salient points of the relation of the primitive history 
of man in Genesis to modern scientific discovery. 
Many other details might have been adduced as 
tending to show similar coincidences of these two 
distinct lines of evidence. Enough has, however, 
been said to indicate the remarkable manner in which 
the history in Genesis has anticipated modern dis- 
covery, and to show that this ancient book is in every 
way trustworthy, and as remote as possible from the 
myths and legends of ancient heathenism, while it 
shows the historical origin of beliefs which in more or 
less corrupted forms lie at the foundations of the oldest 
religions of the Gentiles, and find their true significance 
in that of the Hebrews. To the Christian the record 
in Genesis has a still higher value, as constituting 
those historical groundworks of the plan of salvation 
to which our Lord Himself so often referred, and on 
which He founded so much of His teaching. 



INDEX 



Adam, description of, 64 
Adon, the name, 180 
Akkadian kingdom, foundation 

of, 108 
Alphabets, early, 108 
Amunoph III., 177 
Amunoph IV., 177 
Anakim, the, 65 
Animals, remains of, 23, 30, 38, 

43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 74, 96, 98' 
Antediluvians, identification of, 

125 
Anthropic age, definition of, 17; 

events of, 39 
Anthropology, 16 
Archaean age, the, 19 
Ark, the, description of, 135 
Arrow-headed characters, use 

of, 108 
Artemis, 160 
Aten, worship of, 177 
Atlantis, fable of, 156 
Auriferous gravel, finds in, 34 



Bears, cave, 46 
Beni Elohim, 132 



Beni ha Adam, 132 
Bones, human, gnawed, 47 
Boule, on deposits at Schweiz- 

ersbild, 87 
Britain, early inhabitants of, 103 
Broca, on skulls, 61 
Burials, discoveries of, 56 



Cain, the race of, 131 
Canaan, migration of, 193 
Canstadt race, the, 51, 80; age 
of, 70 ; condition of, 75 ; in- 
terments of, TT ; skulls of, 
81 
Carthaillac on palanthropic age, 
70 ; on the mortuary customs 
of, 77 ■ 
Carving, specimens of, 49 
Castelnedolo, skeleton at, 29 
Cave dwellers, 48 ; their food, 

49 
Caverns, various, 42 
Celtae, the, description of, 104 
Cenozoic age, the, 20 ; changes 
of, 24; events of, 39; rela- 
tions of, 84 



220 



GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



Chaldean version of the Deluge, 
137; creation tablets, 107; 
Genesis quoted, 113 
Cheth, children of, 167 
Chipped Stone age, the, 69 
Chronometers, geological, 89 
Civilisation, early postdiluvian, 

118 
Clichy skull, the, 60 
Climate of the pliocene, 25 ; of 
the eocene, 27 ; changes of, 
35> 36 ; of the post-glacial 
^ge, 36 ; of the palanthropic 
age, 38, 40, 171 
Creation, the, order of, in 
Genesis, 106, 112, 114; 
Chaldean account of, 112 
Cresswell caves, description of, 

95 
Cro-magnon cave, the, 51 
Cro-magnon race, the, 51 ; 
skeletons of, 53 ; skulls of, 
61, 81 ; age of, 70; condition 
of, 75 ; appearance of, 76 ; 
belief of, 76 ; interments of, 

n 

Curse, the, 120 

Cushite kingdom, foundation of, 

108 
Cushite migration, the, 192 

Dawkins on palaeolithic and 

neolithic periods, 93 
Days of creation, the, 14, 18 
Delta, the, age of, 174 
Deluge, the, accounts of, 107 ; 

story of, 121 ; Lenormant on, 

123 ; conclusions as to, 126; 

prevalence of story of, 127 ; 

physical aspects of, 135 ; 



Chaldean version of, 136 ; 
history of, 137 ; was it mira- 
culous? 140; was it universal? 

147, 151 

Diana, 160 

Dispersion of man, the, 108 

Druses, the, 198 

Dupont on cave of Goyet, 46 ; 
on primitive man, 73 ; on 
plain dwellers, 74 ; on Fron- 
tal caves, 98 

Earth, the stages of its history, 

15, 18 ; age of, 18 
Eber, children of, 179 
Eden, site of, 114 
Edwards, Miss, criticism of, 

171 
Egypt, history of, 168 ; first 

colonists of, 174 
Elephant in Europe, the, 38 
Elevation of land in post glacial 

age, 36 
Elohim, use of the name, 112 
Embalming, early practice of, 

78 
Engis skull, the, 60 
Eocene age, the, 23 ; changes 

of, 24 
Eozoic age, the, 19 
Euphrates, the, 114 
Eve, story of, 160 
Evolution of man, the, 22 ; 

vagaries of, 118 
Exodus, the, Pharaoh of, 179 

Fall of man, the, 116 
Fauna of palanthropic age, 

changes of, 86 
Flints, worked, 28 



INDEX 



221 



Food of cave dwellers, 49 
Furfooz caves, description of, 98 

Generations of Noah, the, 

184 
Genesis, order of creation in, 106 
Geologist, the, method of, 12 
Giants, a race of, 63 
Gibraltar skull, the, 60 
Glacial age, the, 25 
Globe, incandescent, picture of, 

18 
Goyet, cave of, description of, 46 
Greenwell on men of Britain, 

103 
Grenelle, skull of, 60 ; deposit 

at, 94 

Hale on importance of lan- 
guage, 206 
Hamites, migrations of, 188 
Hasisadra, the Chaldean Noah, 

118 
Hebrew annals, truth of, 106 
Heth, 167 

Higher criticism, Sayce on, 109 
Historian, the, method of, 12 
Hittites, the, inroad of, 198 
Holmes on worked flints, 31 
Homeric heroes, reality of, 166 
Horus, sons of, 159 
Hyksos, the, 181 

Idinu, or Eden, 1 14 

Ightham, worked flints of, 31 

Interments, discoveries of, 56 ; 
mode of, 77 

Isha, story of, 160 

Ivory, ornaments of, 58 ; en- 
graving on, 74 



JAHVEH, 133 

Japhet, migrations of, 189, 190 
Jebel Assart, flint chips at, 171 
Jehovah Elohim, use of the 

name, 1 12, 132 
Jerusalem, ancient state of, 179 

Karun, a river of Eden, 114, 

116 
Kerkhat, the, 114 
Kheta, or Khalti, 167 
Kneeling posture in interments, 

7.7 

Laugerie Basse, cave at 51 ; 

skeleton at, 58 
Lebanon caves, human remains 

in, 43, 45 ; vibit to, 202 
Lenormant on the Deluge, 123 ; 

on the Ark, 136 
Lion, the cave, 46 
Lyell, on Falls of Niagara, 124 

Mammals in palanthropic age, 
species of, 37 

Mammoth age, cave of, 50 

Mammoth, the, in Europe, 38 ; 
extinction of, 74 

Man, date of his appearance, 
21, 213 J his earliest remains 
still human, 22 ; antecedents 
of, 23 ; his remains overlaid, 
35 ; in Europe, 35 ; in pal- 
anthropic age, 40 ; how dis- 
tinguished, 41 ; his remains 
at Nahr-el-Kelb, 45 ; at Goy- 
et, 46 ; gnawed bones of, 
47 ; a cave dweller, 48 ; his 
ornaments, 48, 58; 'carving 
of, 49 J food of, 49 ; his 



GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



physical characters, 51 ; his 
remains at Cro-magnon, 51 ;■ 
skeleton of, at Mentone, 58 ; 
varieties in skull of, 60 ; gi- 
gantic size of, 62 ; a feebler 
race, 63 ; conditions of, 71; 
Dupont on primitive, 73 ; 
unprogressive character of 
men of mammoth age, 75 ; 
beliefs of, 76 ; mortuary cus- 
toms of palanthropic, 77 ; 
change of, from palteocosmic 
to neocosmic, 91 ; neolithic, 
loi ; of Britain, 103 ; in 
Eden, 115; condition of 
palanthropic, 1 16; recency of, 
213 ; locality of his origin, 216 

Meeting-place of geology and 
history, 13 

Mentone skeleton, the, 58 

Mesozoic age, the, 19 

Metals, the knowledge of, 118 

Miocene age, the, 23 ; changes 
of, 24 ; monkeys of, 27 

Mitanni, 181 

Mizraim, 193 

Monkeys, miocene, 27 

Mortillet on the stone age, 69 

Moses : his knowledge of Divine 
name, 180 

Mourlon on pleistocene remains, 
30 

Musical instruments, invention 
of, 118 



Nahr-EL-Kelb, caverns of, 44 ; 

people of, 203 
Neanderthal skull, the, 60 
Neanthropic age, definition of. 



17 ; events of, 39 ; men of, 

95 
Nebula, picture of, 18 
Necklace, a shell, 48 
Neocosmic age, appearance of, 

men of, 91, 102 
Neolithic age, men of, loi 
Niagai-a, Lyell's use of, 1 24 
Nile valley, limestones of, 168, 

241 ; appearance of, 174 
Nimrod, kingdom of, 190 
Noah, story of, 121 
Nuesch on deposits at Schweiz- 

ersbild, Z^ 



Old man of Cro-magnon, 53 ; 

supposed history of, 65 
Ornaments, remains of, 48, 58 



Paleolithic implements, dis- 
coveries of, 31 

Palaeozoic age, the, 19 

Palanthropic age, definition of, 
17 ; number of species of 
mammals in, 37 ; climate of, 
38 ; land of, 40 ; caves of, 46 ; 
animals of, 50 ; man of, 51 ; 
conditions of, 69 ; divisions 
of, 70 ; tragic end of, 85 ; 
changes in fauna of, 80 ; 
subsidence of, 88 

Palestine, people of, 197 ; his- 
tory of, 201 

Paviland skull, the, 60 

Petrie : his photographic por- 
traits, 180 

Pharaoh of the Exodus, the, 179 

Phoenicians, the, 193 



INDEX 



2C3 



Pictet on number of species in 

palanthropic age, 37 
Pinches on Chaldean Genesis, 

113 

Plain dwellers, 51 ; conditions 

of, 74 
Pleistocene age, definition of, 

17 ; history of, 23 ; human 

remains of, 30 ; events of, 39 
Pliocene age, 23 ; changes of, 

24 ; human remains of, 29 ; 

events of, 39 
Polished Stone age, the, 69 ; 

men of, 10 1 
Post-glacial age, 26 ; elevation 

of, 36 
Punites, 193 

Quaternary period, the, 20 
Quatrefages on Castelnedolo 

skeleton, 29 ; on Truchere 

skull, 84 

Ra, worship of, 177 
Recency of man, 213 
Reclus, romance of, 208 
Reindeer age, the, 38, 50 
Rhinoceros in Europe, the, 38 
Riviere on Mentone skeleton, 
58,62 

Sayce on the higher criticism, 
109 
\ Scale of earth's history, a, 22 
\ Schliemann, discoveries of, 166 
"iivchweizersbild, deposits at, 87 
S\emites, migrations, 189 
Septh, the race of, 131 
Stlell ornaments, remains of, 48, 
('58 



Sickle, wooden, 172 

Silures, the, 103 

Skeleton of Castelnedolo, 29 ; 
Mentone, 58 ; of Laugerie 
Basse, 58 

Skull from Val d'Arno, 29 ; of 
Cro-magnon, 53, 82 ; of 
Clichy, Crenelle, Cibraltar, 
Paviland, Neanderthal, Engis, 
60 ; of Canstadt, 81 ; of 
Truchere, S^ 

Species, number of palanthropic, 

37 
Sphinx, the, history of, 176 
Spy, imterments at, 56 
Stone ages, the, 69 
Submergence, records of, 148 
Subsidence of palanthropic age, 

88 ; date of, 90 

Tammuz, story of, 161 

Taylor on early men of Britain, 

103 
Teeth, human, condition of, 

63 
Tel-el-Amarna tablets, 165, 177 
Tigris, the, 114 
Trenton, flints of, 32 
Tristram on cave shelters, 44 

VEzfeRE, rock shelters of, 51 

Whistle, bone, 116 
Woman of Cro magnon, 55 
Woolly rhinoceros in Europe, 
the, 38 

ZiTTEL on number of species of 
mammals, 37 



s 

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